In the following short essay, Dazey analyzes the title of "The Secret Sharer" as a clue into the deeper meaning of the story.
The ambiguity in Joseph Conrad's title Heart of Darkness is readily apparent because the nouns heart and darkness commonly suggest a variety of denotations and have a wide range in their levels of abstraction. The ambiguity in the title of his short story "The Secret Sharer," is more subtle but equally intriguing. Although the story concerns two characters, the Captain and his physical double Leggatt, whom he pulls from the South China Sea and saves from death, the title is not "The Secret Sharers." The referent of the singular noun sharer is, thus, ambiguous. A second ambiguity derives from the fact that the word secret can be read in the familiar pattern.....
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