SOURCE: "The Journey Within," in Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 1-59.

An American novelist, short story writer, biographer, and critic, Guerard is also the author of two studies of Conrad, Joseph Conrad (1947), and Conrad the Novelist (1958). In the following excerpt from the latter work, he offers his interpretation of "The Secret Sharer."

"On my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes …" The strange first paragraph of "The Secret Sharer," with its dream landscape of ill-defined boundaries between land, air and sea, prepares us for this most frankly psychological of Conrad's shorter works. Even at a quite explicit level it is the story of a personality test: "I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets...