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 fugitive sailor, outlined in phosphorescence, naked, the captain’s look-alike. We learn he is a murderer. The captain, guilty of a lawless sympathy, allows him on board and hides him. The tale — half dream — is a night journey of the soul.
Joseph 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, organized by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Germany at the behest of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold usurped the Congo, under the guise of Christianity and humanitarian interests. Heart of Darkness is set there in the 1890s. Its narrator, Marlow, tells the story of captaining a small tin pot stern wheeler, driving farther and farther up the Congo River, while delivering supplies to the white outposts and taking ivory tusks provided by black slaves. Along the way, he hears tales of a legendary agent Mr. Kurtz, who is rumored to have committed barbarous acts.
At the last station and largest supplier of ivory, Marlow finally meets 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.