Joseph Conrad's stories Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer share many similarities. Conrad chooses to present each story from the point of view of one main narrator: Marlow in Heart of Darkness and an unnamed captain in The Secret Sharer. The stories take place on a ship where both Marlow and the unnamed captain are on their first command. It is in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer that both stories convey a developing struggle for the protagonists to maintain a sense of identity and sanity when their professional skills and premature illusions are challenged by unpredictable trials. In dealing with the crisis, the protagonists begin to reconstruct their identity and develop moral ideas that are rooted in acknowledgement of their own and other's strengths and weaknesses.

In Heart of Darkness, the display of a naïve and idealized view of the world is shown. The...