SOURCE: Martinière, Nathalie. “Symbolic Space and Narrative Focus: The Cabin in Conrad's Sea Stories.” The Conradian 27, no. 1 (spring 2002): 24-38.

In the following essay, Martinière explores how the spatial organization of ships affects individuality and community in “The Secret Sharer,” The Shadow-Line, and The Nigger of the “Narcissus.”

Many of Conrad's novels and short stories deal with the loss of reassuring landmarks that characterized the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. God's “death,” proclaimed by Nietzsche, and Freud's theories, together with political and social upheavals, left people isolated in a universe of instability and doubt. Conrad's sea fictions display a desperate yet lucid desire to preserve or recreate aboard ship a feeling of togetherness that no longer existed elsewhere. This longing is expressed in highly lyrical ways, and the sailors are repeatedly described as members of “the brotherhood of the sea” (The...