Psychological thriller of Joseph Conrad: thoughts on the short-story "The Secret Sharer"

A famous short-story of Joseph Conrad "The Secret Sharer" is under analysis which is not well thought of in Russian Anglistics. The short-story is looked at in the light of Conrad's artistic world making. It is argued that on the one hand, Conrad sums up many approaches to the depicting of a man in a developing society which were in the centre of interest of many writers offin de siecle. On the other hand, Conrad invents and develops artistic peculiarities of representing in fiction a very much ambivalent and complicated being of a person in the crucially changed world in the 20th century. Conrad is supposed to be one of the first writers who depicted any externality. The author of the essay shows what makes this short-story not just a marine narrative only, but a well-done psychological thriller, too. One the main ways to sharpen the psychological conflict of the story and to bring suspense, so common for any thriller, into it Conrad uses is the motif of 'the doubles'. His use of this motif is analyzed in comparison with the doubles in the artistic works of some of his predecessors and contemporaries. The author of the essay develops the idea of the ambivalence of the doubles in the story by Conrad, it is stressed that the doubles in the story are based on the effect of complementarity, but not on the unity of contrasts, which prevailed in the interpretation of the doubles before. Here Conrad is quite close to F.M. Dostoevsky no matter how much the English novelist of the Polish origin disliked the Russian writer. The author of the essay deals with the issues of the narrator in the stories by Conrad on the whole and in this short-story in particular. The author disputes the idea of some critics about 'unreliability' of the narrator in 'The Secret Sharer'; it is done on the grounds of a principal approach of Conrad to his narrator in this story as a representative of a human being in the situation of initiation in tote. It is shown in the essay that Joseph Conrad is an innovator when he constructs the image of his narrator: he turns this image into an active personage of the story who, when telling the thrilling narrative about the Other, speaks about himself thus acting both as a subject and an object of the narration. In the course of the analysis of the story it is shown how much complex is the ideology of the story: the narrator pulls himself together and gains the meaning of life as a result of the analysis of the dramatic events which are the basis of the psychologically tense plot.

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