SOURCE: Stape, J. H. “Topography in ‘The Secret Sharer’.” The Conradian 26, no. 1 (spring 2001): 1-16.

In the following essay, Stape elucidates the symbolic significance of Conrad's topographical descriptions in “The Secret Sharer” in terms of existential isolation and the inner “topography” of the human psyche.

Despite the detailed attention paid to the sources of “The Secret Sharer” and to Conrad's experience of the Far East,¹ the story's topography has garnered little critical interest. The almost exclusively shipboard setting certainly accounts partly for this, the land playing a role only at the opening and conclusion. At both moments, however, Conrad's graphic descriptions have a signal symbolic resonance. In the first instance, the crossing of the bar—the juncture when the ship sloughs off her final links with the land to reach the freedom of the open sea—betokens a transitional moment: the captain and crew achieve their identities and hierarchical...