The Secret Sharer

In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, many parallels and opposite concepts are presented through parallel language. The most thematic of these may be the “strangeness” of the captain, a stranger in what is essentially his own home among his own people, and the familiarity he finds in a true stranger, his double. But I would rather look at the language of one of the first of these distinctions, the one between the stillness of the sea as described in the first few pages, and the storm as related by the fugitive. The captain describes the atmosphere as “very still in an immense stillness”, the ship floating in a vast expanse, and uses “solid, so still and stable” and “smoothly” to create the hiss of the silence. “There was not a sound in [the ship]”, and the hissing silence is “breathless” and in it “nothing lived”. This is a lifeless, lonely, static sea, as is the captain who observes it.

The words used in regard to the storm described by the fugitive are not so smooth and similar, they are instead jagged and violent, “furious”, “anxious”, “fierce”, and use verbs of direct action to emphasize the heightened situation, “rushed”, “gripped”, “running”, “yelling”, “shaking”. The language is conversational, “You understand the sort of weather”, “Terrific weather… terrific, I tell you”. The speaker exclaims repeated phrases in his distress, and speaks incomplete, abrupt sentences. In contrast to the eternally quiet breathless sea in the captain’s eyes, the storm of the fugitive can scream Murder and is alive so much that it, and the fugitive’s victim, can be killed. Life is only appreciated once death has become an option.