SOURCE: Thomas, Mark Ellis. “Doubling and Difference in Conrad: ‘The Secret Sharer,’ Lord Jim, and The Shadow Line.” Conradiana 27, no. 3 (1995): 222-34.

In the following essay, Thomas examines the motif of the double in Conrad's “The Secret Sharer,” Lord Jim, and The Shadow Line.

One way Joseph Conrad rebelled against the (apparently unruffled) realism of the nineteenth century and contributed to the developing modernist aesthetic was to revaluate the doubling device of Gothic romance, lately adopted into the realm of novelistic conventions, especially in the popular novels of sensation. In revamping Gothic character doubling, Conrad puts the device to some new uses, to convey his deeply ironic vision of reality. In this way Conrad exemplifies a shift toward philosophical skepticism that characterized the late Victorian period and grew into existentialist modernism. Returning difference rather than similarity, Conrad's doubles are an important means of representing a world in which patterns...