This was a strange novella, where I found the captain's decision-making questionable at best - surely every captain-training manual includes the unspoken rule of not risking your entire crew for the sake of a stranger you identify with! At least he acknowledges his mistakes in hindsight, years later it appears. But even if I didn't like any of the characters, I still enjoyed the sharp-witted way in which they were described, as well as the setting - I've only been out to sea once or twice, but this had me wishing I could take a trip out there again. ( )

I inherited Conrad's collected works from my grandfather, and this story was included.

I wrote this review for Goodreads's Short Story Club.

I didn’t find the story easily comprehensible and the extensive nautical jargon didn’t improve matters.

It was the narrator’s first position as captain. He was a stranger to the other officers and crew members, a stranger to the ship and “somewhat of a stranger to myself”.

What does he mean by this enigmatic statement - a stranger to himself? I can’t see that he explains it elsewhere in the story, though he may have done.

The captain (what is his name?) rescues a man, Leggatt, from the sea; he had been chief mate in a ship called the Sephora, moored nearby. He had accidentally killed another officer and jumped into the sea to escape eventual prosecution.

The captain sees Leggatt is no homicidal maniac”, believes his story and thus agrees to hide him.

He manges to conceal him in his cabin and gives him a grey “sleeping suit” just like he himself wears.

The captain keeps referring to Leggatt as his double. He feels Leggatt is just like himself.

He and Leggatt are “”the two strangers in the ship”.

Leggatt is the captain’s “other self”. At one point the captain felt “doubly vexed” and “dual more than ever”.

Why is the narrator, the captain, so fixated on regarding Leggatt as his “secret self”, a man similar to himself?

He also comes to doubt whether Leggatt really is there. “Can it be” --- “that he is not visible to other eyes than mine?” “It was like being haunted.”

He feels more comfortable when down below with Leggatt than with any of the others.

He feels he is “near insanity”” whereas Leggatt is sane.

Conrad uses many words to indicate that things are not as they seem, that they are unreal, for example, “phantom” as in “silent like a phantom sea”. My dictionary defines “phantom” as “not really existing”.

Also “dreamy”, as in “a dreamy contemplative appearance”.

It seems as if the captain may have some sort of mental problem and sees himself split into two.

“And it was as if the ship had two captains”. The captain and Leggatt resemble each other and both wear “sleeping suits” which fact gives us the connotation of the whole thing being a dream.

The captain states that part of himself is absent. He refers to “that mental feeling of being in two places at once”.

To the consternation of the other officers, the captain agrees to manoeuvre the ship close to some islands so as to allow Leggatt to leave the ship and be able to survive. Leggatt, the captain’s second self, is “a free man --- striking out for a new destiny”.

At the end there is a reference to “the gateway of Erebus”. According to my dictionary, Erebus is “the gloomy caverns underground through which the Shades had to walk in their passage to Hades”.

To sum up, I will say that it was hard to interpret what Conrad meant to communicate to us by his story.

Was he trying to illuminate some sort of psychological split in the captain? Is the whole experience some sort of dream? Is it significant that we never learn the captain’s name, as though he didn’t really exist? ( )

Killer language. Great storytelling. Could be mistaken for Kafka with some of those descriptions concerning man's consciousness with regards to his surroundings. My second Conrad and I plan to keep going. ( )

O Compartilhador de Segredos é a narrativa na primeira pessoa de um jovem Capitão, que se depara com um homem boiando ao lado de seu navio, chamado Legatt. A história se passa no mar, perto do Golfo do Sião, contada a partir da perspectiva do capitão - que permanece sem nome. Este leva Legatt para bordo, veste-o e esconde-o. Um e outro parecem ser Doppelgängers (duplos), mas a natureza exata da dualidade permanece ambígua no romance - excelente como quase tudo de Conrad. ( )

Conrad's subversive little tale will leave the reader questioning what is real, what defines morality and authority, and leave an aching doubt about the nature of male-bonding...within fewer than a hundred pages. ( )