The Secret Sharer is narrated by a young captain who is on his first command, in a ship already fully manned. As he says, “... my position was of the only stranger on board, and I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.” Into his life swims a sailor, outlined in phosphorescence, naked, the captain’s look-alike. We learn he is a murderer. The captain, guilty of lawless sympathy, allows him on board and hides him. The tale — half dream — is a night journey of the soul.
Conrad said of the European colonization of Africa that it was ”the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the human conscience.” It was sanctioned by the Berlin Conference of 1884. King Leopold II of Belgium usurped the Congo. Heart of Darkness is set there in the 1890s. Its narration is Marlow’s reminiscence of captaining a small tin pot stern wheeler, driving farther and farther up the Congo River, delivering supplies to the white outposts and taking ivory tusks provided by black slaves. The protective political guise is the furtherance of western culture and Christianity.
At the last station and largest supplier of ivory, Marlow finally meets Mr. Kurtz, a legend among the natives all along the river, and the darkness is complete. The always-solitary night journey brings profound spiritual change to the sojourner/voyager.
Instructor Geoffrey Robinson earned his B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from Yale University. He has taught in secondary schools in Connecticut; at Maarif College in Samsun, Turkey; and at the Penobscot Language School in Rockland, Maine. Geoffrey has also spent 25 years as a dealer in paintings, specializing in 19th- and 20th-century European and American art.