Critical Commentary
Literary critics are almost unanimous in hailing Conrad as a master
novelist and stylist. There are those, however, who are bothered by certain
facets of Conrad's style and tend to emphasize the strength of his moral
attitudes. This school, led by the British critic, F. R. Leavis, believes that
Conrad follows the great tradition of English novelists, from Austen to Eliot
to Dickens, who are able to dramatize the great moral and ethical issues that
face society. Leavis does not particularly enjoy the adjectival excesses of
Conrad's style and thinks that Conrad is on surer aesthetic grounds when he is
presenting objective incident, e.g., heads on posts, to charge the atmosphere
of his stories with the fantasy of truth.
Conrad's Themes:
In his 'Familiar Preface' to A Personal Record, Conrad has offered a
statement which has often been taken as the summation of his thematic
intentions. In it Conrad says, "Those who read me know my conviction that the
world, the temporal world, rests on few simple ideas: so simple that they must
be old as the hills. It rests, notable, among others, on the idea of
Fidelity."
Critics have variously interpreted the meanings of "Fidelity." Douglas
Hewitt notes that to read this pronouncement as a simple straightforward
belief in "doing one's job" would be to miss the basic pessimism with which
Conrad viewed humanity. Hewitt charges Conrad with a form of "nihilism" -
believing that his characters face their problems against a background which
cannot be changed and which ultimately must defeat them. Although Conrad
personally disavowed any kinship with the thematic intentions of Dostoyevsky,
Hewitt finds striking resemblances between them, especially when they deal
with conceptualized evil. For Hewitt "Fidelity" in Conrad means fidelity to a
concept of infidelity or hollowness. Kurtz's creed, "Exterminate all the
brutes," would be an example of fidelity gone wrong or maimed by hollowness.
Albert Guerard probably does the best job on the difficulties of
interpreting the main thrust of Conrad's meaning. After analyzing his personal
novels and his letters, his prefaces and his autobiographies, Guerard
concludes that there are a number of inner conflicts which must be considered
in order to fully appreciate Conrad's universe of fidelity:
a) Conrad felt bound to the authoritarianism of the mariner tradition and
yet was motivated by his fierce individualism.
b) Conrad loved action but had a predilection for passive reverie.
c) Conrad was extremely conservative politically but sympathized greatly
with the poor and disenfranchised.
d) Conrad believed ethical matters were simple but was extraordinarily
sensitive to the complexity of moral problems.
e) Conrad shared the rationalist's distrust of the unconscious but he was
possessed by a psychological drive that made him search deeply into the
subconscious for motivation.
f) He distrusted idealism and revered it.
g) He feared the effects of faith-destroying intellect but he was
gifted with a deeply ironic scepticism.
h) Finally, Conrad declared his fidelity and commitment to law as above
the individual but he also believed that the betrayal of the individual was
the most deeply felt of all crimes.
In short, Guerard outlines the conflicts between "this conscientious man
and his wayward imagination." If viewed as a result of these inner
contradictions, Conrad's novels seemed forged out of a driving need to
establish some kind of aesthetic decorum which would resolve his inner drives.
Yet, Conrad analyzed from a psychoneurotic point of view, as Guerard would
have it, is Conrad stripped of his devastating ability to create a reality of
the torment and perverted ecstasy prevalent in the divided heart.
Images And Symbols:
Before the revealing episodes in all of his stories, Conrad puts his
characters through a shadow or fog: in Heart of Darkness there is the dense,
white fog just below Kur z's station; in Lord Jim there is that dense, white
fog before Brown starts his fatal trip down the river in Patusan; in The
Secret Sharer the ship drives through the shadow of Kohring before it turns
out toward the sea. Conrad uses the shadow and the fog, according to many
critics, as his symbol of the unconscious. In each of these highly personal
stories, Conrad works on two levels: both telling the adventure story and
conducting an equally adventuresome descent into the subconscious.
Another artist and thinker, Carl Jung, also explored the significance of
the subconscious and its influence on our lives. Jung believed that it was
necessary for every man to reach into his subconscious, to explore and
understand it, and what is more, to gain control of the subconscious, before
he could successfully lead his conscious life. Thus before the climax of each
of his novels, Conrad presents a descent into the subconscious and a struggle
with it. From this point of view, Leggatt in The Secret Sharer is the alter
ego of the young Captain and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness is the alter ego
representing the dark forces of Marlowe's own subconscious. On an imagistic
level, the alter-image of the fog, shadow or mist is light. Light stands for
the conscious perception of those forces that govern our lives. Darkness
stands for the destructive, primitively harbored urges that dominate our
personality. The interspersal of light with the dark is Conrad's way of
stating that man needs above all self-knowledge and this knowledge is
tenebrously compounded.
Frederick Karl plots Marlowe's trip into the Congo as a trip into a
modern version of hell. He identifies fifty separate images which are all
concerned one way or another with hellish things. Death and decay infest the
story throughout, futility is incessantly underscored, and metallic and
inflexible substances are strewn about. Kurtz is defined as a Dantesque sort
of devil whose bald head itself becomes an allied symbol of the ivory he
collects. Karl claims that the accumulation of images, although only
tangentially related to the main plot line, relate to a more general
experience beyond the boundaries of the story. Conrad's imagistic use of
language expands our vision of Kurtz and his small jungle empire. We see in
him the hollowness of western society and the degradation its materialism has
caused. Furthermore, Karl contends that Conrad's characters are all impelled
by some illusion of personal grandiosity; in other words, people in Conrad's
stories are busy painting reality over to suit their own needs. These
characters follow a dream as if it were a reality. Once you accept this
assumption about them, it becomes rational to accept Conrad's use of symbols
and images to construct a world around them. He is merely matching the form to
the content, using metaphor to clarify a metaphorical existence. One of the
effects of this intense impressionism of images is to suggest that illusions
exist for every man and that no one "sees" truly and as Robert Penn Warren has
pointed out, illusion is necessary, "is infinitely precious, is the work of .
. . human achievement, and is, in the end, his only truth."
Social Psychological Criticism:
It is interesting to measure the particular orientation of a critic
against his resulting criticism. In Joseph Conrad: A Study in Non -
conformity, Osborn Andreas would have us believe that Conrad's major creations
deal with the problems of individuals adjusting to a mass society. The
individual is perceived as struggling against group pressures to conform and
Conrad himself is seen as trying to emancipate himself from the neurotic coils
of guilt which had been winding around him ever since he left Poland. I said
before that it might be interesting to gauge a critic through his orienting
esthetic, however, in some critics, the orientation is so limited that it
confines the artist and his work to a pigeon-hole. This compartmentalization
so distorts the perception of the literary work that it is difficult to
realize that one is talking about the same novel. In the case of Andreas,
psychological jargon and the overuse of social psychology delimits Conrad's
meanings and robs him of his rich philosophic potential. Conformity may be one
of Conrad's ideas but it is not his central thesis.
Heart Of Darkness And The Critics
Early Critics: Garnett And Masefield:
In the years 1902 and 1903, which witnessed the publication of Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, Conrad criticism was in its infancy. However, even at this
early date there was a considerable divergence of opinion about the artistic
values of Heart of Darkness. Edward Garnett, ever alert to genuine talent, saw
in this story a psychological masterpiece. It caught the variety of shadings
in the white man's difficult and weird relations with the exploited savages of
Africa: "it implies the acutest analysis of the deterioration of the white
man's morale, when he is let loose from European restraint. . . ." Conrad's
presentation artistically arranges sensations and sequences of action in order
to signify the essential meaning and/or meaninglessness of the white man in
uncivilized Africa. Masefield, on the other hand, was one of the first to find
fault with Conrad's rhetoric. Claiming that Conrad showed a tendency towards
the "precious," he indicts him for polishing his prose to such a finish that
he obscures the message. Also, he does not believe that Conrad's central
character, Kurtz, is entirely believable; too much has been sketched in to
make the reader believe or sympathize with his predicament. Despite these
disclaimers Masefield does acknowledge that Conrad's was a poetic temperament
and his artistic expression was "trembling with beauty."
Harold R. Collins:
In an essay published in The Western Humanities Review, Collins
demonstrates that Kurtz and the helmsman share in the moral isolation caused
by detribalization, while the cannibals do not. Kurtz facing the jungle
unprepared, professing to bring enlightenment to "darkest" Africa, is himself
deprived of enlightenment because he has been cut loose from his tribal ways -
he loses his European moral structure. The swaggering helmsman is an example
of the effects of partial detribalization. He would like to behave like the
white man and does indeed share a certain kinship with his white master,
Marlowe. Nevertheless, at the crucial attack on the river-boat, he cannot
discard his tribal heritage; he reverts to an old African war dance thus
throwing his own life away and endangering the entire crew.
The cannibals are not yet defiled by contact with the white man. Collins
feels that the cannibals may be morally indefensible-they eat people-but
they are not "isolates." He quotes Diedrich Westermann's description of the
social conditions of the uncivilized African in The African Today and
Tomorrow: "The consciousness of being a well protected member of a group gives
the individual a definite . . . dignity. . . . He knows no crawling humility,
no slavish flattery, and he is not easily embarrassed. Within his own circle
he is never in a position when he does not know how to behave or what to do."
It is for these reasons that Marlowe remarks about their "dignified and
profoundly pensive attitude." When Kurtz opens his mouth as if to swallow the
entire universe, he demonstrates a cannibalism of quite a different order-a
morally desperate voracity. While Kurtz and the helmsman are destroyed by the
effects of detribalization, the cannibals traveling as they do with their
society intact can survive.
Marlowe's Function:
In an essay printed in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad W. Y. Tindall
defends Conrad's use of Marlowe as aesthetically correct. F. R. Leavis found
Conrad's story marred by Marlowe's excessive talking. When Marlowe is around,
Leavis felt that Conrad had abdicated the "objective correlative" so necessary
to support the narrative progress of events: Conrad becomes "intent on making
a virtue out of not knowing what he means." Tindall claims that Marlowe has a
double function-to serve the interests of realism as well as those of
aesthetic distance. Marlowe functions as a Jamesian "central intelligence"
through whom the reader gets an interpretation of what is transpiring in the
story. Since Marlowe is both reporter and agent to the event, we receive a
subjective truth entirely compatible with Conrad's belief that for the most
part truth is inscrutable and illusion governs human affairs. In his very
"long-windedness" Marlowe reveals the central realities of the story he has
been said to mar. We as readers must make the distinction between Conrad, the
reporter, and Marlowe, the interpreter. Once we have identified the several
strains of character and attitude unique to Marlowe, we can share with him his
discovery of self. Without Marlowe, Conrad might he guilty of a more heinous
crime than verbosity, namely, the sin of didacticism which is fatal to the
work of art. That is, without the sometimes illuminating and sometimes
interfering refractions of Marlowe's thoughts, nothing would stand between us
and "the message."
Kurtz Is Hollow As Persuasive Fiction:
Echoing Masefield somewhat, Marvin Murdick in an essay published in The
Hudson Review, "The Originality of Conrad," attacks the creation of Kurtz as a
believable character. Murdick states that Conrad has not justified all the
fuss he has made about Kurtz since when we do get to know him, he is revealed
through pat, insubstantial irony. This is wholly insufficient documentation
for the "universal genius" who has become cosmically degenerate.
The final scene between Marlowe and the Intended comes in for a great
deal of adverse criticism from Murdick. He feels that it is composed of "cheap
irony" and is full of "melodramatic tricks," especially when Marlowe describes
emotional changes through sighs and heart palpitations. However, Murdick does
recognize Conrad's great contribution as the writer who established that
meaning in a work of fiction must be inherent in every recorded sensation:
"After Heart of Darkness, the recorded moment-the word-was irrecoverably
symbol."
Mythic And Epic Parallels:
Marlowe's heroic search and the essentially tragic implication of his
discovery have encouraged critics to assign literary parallels between Heart
of Darkness and certain classical and archetypal journeys. Conrad's compulsive
ambiguity and usage of symbolism have contributed to the wide divergence of
the resulting parallels. Jerome Thale, for one, writing in University of
Toronto Quarterly, July, 1955, likens Marlowe to the knight in a medieval
quest. He sees Marlowe's search for Kurtz as the knight's search for the holy
grail and the illumination it can provide. Thale connects the grail motif with
the profuse light-dark symbolism. Even though what Marlowe finds in the
heart of darkness is even darker than present knowledge, he still achieves a
form of illumination-self knowledge.
Recently, Lilian Feder, in an essay printed in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, IX, has pointed out a number of significant parallels with Virgil's
descent in the sixth book of the Aeneid. Hades and the jungle are to Miss
Feder legendary rather than actual underworlds and Marlowe's descent is termed
an ideological rather than an actual immersion into hell.
Robert O. Evans disputes Feder's analogy with Virgil's source work. For
him the important ideas in the Heart of Darkness find their true source in
Dante's Inferno. Although he concedes that certain of Conrad's devices are
shared by myths in general, he sees the underlying pattern of the story as a
skeletonized version of the Inferno. He refers in particular to the concept of
the Vestibule, the idea of the Limbo, the Nether Hell, the City of Dis and the
Satanic inner circle. Evans uses the parallel with Dante to demonstrate that
Conrad uses a variety of "epic" devices to insure that the reader achieves a
certain kind of emotional freedom and is not retarded in his responses.
In "The Lotus Posture and 'The Heart of Darkness'" by William Stein,
still another parallel is advanced-the similarity of Marlowe's discovery
with the ideal of dispassionate Buddhahood. Regarding Marlowe's adventure as
essentially a spiritual discipline, Stein sees Marlowe's journey as breaking
free from the limits his own flesh imposes. What Marlowe discovers in the
heart of darkness is the "way of the Bodhisattva." He discovers the suffering
he has endured while being attached to external matter and he emerges from his
own hell into the ascetic ideal, purified and cleansed of all earthly
materialistic attachments. Although the evidence for this spiritual
consecration is meagre, Stein finds the frame of the story not dependent on
any "epic" technique. Indeed, to read this story as a development in Christian
ego-strength would be to distort the mockery of the Christian underworlds
displayed by Marlowe's ironic attitude.
The Secret Sharer And The Critics
Curley's View:
Daniel Curley, in an essay published in Conrad's Secret Sharer and the
Critics, defines this story as belonging to a type called "initiation -
ritual." He sees Leggatt as an ideal personality who has not been homicidally
impelled. Rather, the reverse is true; Leggatt has demonstrated superb self -
understanding and typifies the kind of moral strength that the Captain aspires
to achieve. By replicating Leggatt's initiation into self-confident manhood,
the Captain actively manifests his mastery of the test of initiation.
Carl Benson:
Benson finds difficulty with accepting the version of The Secret Sharer
as a complete initiation. In his article, "Conrad's Two Stories of
Initiation," Benson compares this story unfavorably with another Conrad short
story, The Shadow Line. Benson thinks that at the end of The Secret Sharer the
Captain does not really understand the full nature of his communal duties.
True, he has mastered himself in a limited egocentric way but he has not shown
that he has achieved more than a perfunctory establishment of his authority as
ship's captain. In the Shadow Line, Benson finds that Conrad has prolonged and
intensified the nature of the initiation test. Perhaps the most important
factor in complicating the process of testing is the insertion of an
opportunity to feel remorse for the crew. By linking the Captain with the
crew, Conrad has linked him with a wider human solidarity. What really happens
in The Secret Sharer, and Benson makes sure the reader recognizes he is not
trying to minimize its artistic power-is that the Captain has become aware
of his own self-a necessary stage before he can become aware of how much
self is limited and developed by the community.
Walter F. Wright:
In a section from his book, Romance and Tragedy in Joseph Conrad, Walter
Wright identifies a Christian motif as the source of the thematic meaning of
The Secret Sharer. Specifically, he calls attention to the motif of the kind
act saving the doer. You will recall that in a burst of tenderness the Captain
has given Leggatt his hat to protect him from the sun. This impulsive donation
in turn works to prevent the Captain's ship from being destroyed. Wright finds
that although Conrad disliked Tolstoy's belief in Christianity as a base for
his art, he himself, as demonstrated by the gift in this story, used Christian
ethics to climax The Secret Sharer. In Christian tragedy the hero achieves a
form of expiation of his guiltiness when his own sin makes him pity others. As
a result of his feeling of kinship and pity for Leggatt, the Captain
compassionately offers the hat, thereby furnishing grounds for his communion
with the crew-in other words, communion with life at large.
Imagery in Conrad's Works
The Image Of The Shadow.
Before the revealing episodes in all of his stories, Conrad puts his
characters through a shadow or fog: in Heart of Darkness there is the dense
white fog just below Kurtz's station; in Lord Jim there is that dense white
fog before Brown starts his fatal trip down the river in Patusan; in The
Secret Sharer the ship drives through the shadow of Koh-ring before it turns
out toward the sea. Conrad uses the shadow and the fog as his symbol of the
subconscious. In each of these highly personal stories, Conrad works on two
levels: both telling the adventure story and conducting a descent into the
subconscious.
Another artist and thinker, Carl Jung, also explored the significance of
the subconscious and its influence on our lives. Jung believed that it was
necessary for every man to reach into his subconscious, to explore and
understand it, and what is more, to gain control of the subconscious, before
he could successfully lead his conscious life. Exploration of the
subconscious, then, is tantamount to living consciously.
Thus, before the climax of each of his novels, Conrad presents a descent
into the subconscious and a struggle with it. From this point of view, Leggatt
in The Secret Sharer is the alter ego of the young Captain Marlow; Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness represents the dark forces of Marlow's own subconscious;
Brown in Lord Jim represents Jim's alter ego-just as Jim is a reflection of
Marlow's own romantic nature.
The alter-image of the fog, shadow, and mist is light. Light stands for
the conscious perception of those forces that govern our lives. Thus Stein, in
his cavernous study, walks about in the shadow talking to Marlow. Suddenly he
steps into the lamplight to announce his solution to the problem of "how to
be." Stein shouts, "In the destructive element immerse." In the same novel,
Jim wins his internal struggle of accepting himself, as a flash of lightning
momentarily lights him. Later, in Patusan, he stands on the beach, all the
light of the setting sun gathering into him (the light signifies his victory
over the dark forces) until, with Marlow's words, we are reminded of his
ultimate fate, a dark fate: ". . . and suddenly I losa him."
Conrad is able to have both the adventure story and the descent into the
subconscious run a parallel course successfully by selecting images of light
and dark to show the way to his reader.
Religious Allusions In Conrad's Stories.
Conrad chooses images from Christian, classical, and Eastern religions.
In Lord Jim, for example, he refers at one time to a "father confessor," at
another time to an avatar (originally, a Sanskrit word meaning the human
embodiment of a god), and in still another place, to the Styx (the river that
separates the world of the living from the world of the dead in classical
mythology). These images, in turn, fall into three classifications, regardless
of their original source. First and foremost, Conrad uses the classical device
of a descent into Hell. Second, he follows the traditional Christian pattern
of the quest. Finally, he uses the figure of the god made into man, the
avatar, which occurs in all religions.
The pattern of a descent into Hell is most clearly seen in Heart of
Darkness. The pattern is used in Homer's Odyssey and in Virgil's Aeneid. The
hero of the tale must descend into Hell to discover some piece of information
that is extremely important to him. The only person who can provide this
information is the "shade" of a former friend or relative. The journey into
Hell is dangerous and filled with perils on all sides. Once in Hell, the hero
finds a misty, clouded scene. If he meets people, they usually appear vague
and indistinct to him. The parallel to Heart of Darkness should leap out to
the reader at this point. Marlow thinks of Kurtz as a voice. When he finally
does reach Kurtz, Marlow talks to him for several days, until Kurtz dies.
Kurtz's final message to Marlow is, remember, "The horror. The horror." The
trip up the Congo has been fraught with danger. Finally, the scene in the
interior is sufficiently "Hellish" to satisfy us: the shrunken heads mounted
on posts before Kurtz's house, the strange "ceremonies" in which Kurtz and the
natives indulge, the witch doctors standing on the shore line as Kurtz leaves,
and most of all, the dense white fog that envelops the river-boat just
before it reaches Kurtz's station.
The patter, then, is complete: the dangerous voyage within, the mists and
fog in Hell, the asking for information, and the final message itself, all fit
into this pattern.
"Quest" is a literary word for search, with some special implications.
Perhaps the most famous of all quest stories is the search for the Holy Grail.
In the Middle Ages, knights believed that the chalice from which Christ drank
still existed. Many knights went off in search of the chalice or grail. Thus a
quest is a searching after something of considerable importance; and
successfully finding the object would bring special powers and grace to the
hero. A typical theme in modern literature is a quest for a father, a theme
used by James Joyce in his great novel Ulysses. The necessary elements of the
qdest include an object to be discovered, the trip of discovery itself, and
the enlightenment at the end. The Secret Sharer offers us a good example of
such a pattern. At the beginning of the story, the young Captain confesses
that he is a stranger to his ship and to himself. His voyage, then, will be a
discovery both of himself and of the world around him. His voyage is filled
with danger, the danger of discovery of his second self, Leggatt, by the crew
of the ship. In the second part of the story, the release of Leggatt and the
course of the ship through the shadow of Koh-ring is dangerous too. The
young Captain succeeds in meeting this test of his self-knowledge, and of
his seamanship, with the help of the hat, the Jungian symbol for the
personality. In Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness Conrad uses the image of the
"pilgrims" to suggest the nature of the journey that is being made.
The avatar occurs primarily in the figures of Stein and Kurtz, in Lord
Jim and Heart of Darkness respectively. Both men have supernatural
characteristics: Stein is too good for this world, and Kurtz is too bad. Stein
is wise, successful, kind, heroic, and romantic. Kurtz is satanic, fiendish,
awesome, and cruel.
Conrad uses the religious allusions to give structure and order to his
tales, and to increase their richness and significance. The tales must not be
read only as religious allegories, however. On every level-as adventure
story, as psychological probing, and as religious allegory-the stories
delight and amuse us, and help us to perceive more clearly the world around
us.
Biographical Content In Conrad's Tales.
We have already seen in a general way how Conrad used material from his
experience as a seaman in his novels. We saw the Jeddah affair transformed
into the Patna affair of Lord Jim. We saw the Cutty Sark incident, which
occurred in 1880, transformed into Leggatt's experience abroad the Sephora in
The Secret Sharer. In the biographical introduction to Heart of Darkness, we
can see that Conrad used his experiences with the directors of the Congo
Company and with his aunt as a source for Marlow's story about how he came to
go to the Congo.
After Conrad's death, his literary executors discovered two notebooks
that belonged to the novelist from the period when he had gone into the Congo.
These, along with an accompanying essay by his friend, Richard Curle, were
published in the volume Last Essays in 1926. From these notebooks it is
possible to discover exactly how closely Conrad worked from his own experience
when he wrote Heart of Darkness. Anyone who goes to the trouble of making this
comparison comes to the conclusion that Conrad was working very closely indeed
from his actual experiences. Places and even people mentioned in Heart of
Darkness have direct counterparts in the notebooks. Kurtz, for example, seems
to have been a man named Georges-Antoine Klein. The illness of
which Marlow speaks was real too; Conrad almost died as a
result of it.
Stage by stage, we can follow Conrad's journey up the Congo and compare
it to Marlow's journey; for the notebooks contain a log of the up-river
journey, and the second notebook contains a technical account of the
navigation of the Congo. Apparently, Conrad did not refer to these notebooks
when he wrote Heart of Darkness. His powers of recall, then, must have been
tremendous, and the impression of his Congo journey must have been very deep.
The three tales we have considered are more openly biographical than
Conrad's other novels. In them, Conrad has used his actual experiences as the
basic structure upon which he hangs his surface of images and details, and
through which he penetrates into the shadowy regions.
Conrad's Critics.
Literary critics are almost unanimous in hailing Conrad as a master
novelist and symbolist. I must say "almost unanimous" because there is a
second school of Conrad criticism which sees Conrad, not as a symbolist, but
as a writer in the tradition of Dickens, whose primary concern is with moral
ideas. This second school is led by the British critic, F. R. Leavis. Leavis
feels that Conrad's greatness lies in his ability to present the basic moral
issues that face society. Leavis does not particularly enjoy the elaborate
descriptions Conrad injects into his novels, nor does he agree that Lord Jim
is one of Conrad's greatest novels. As a matter of fact, Leavis agrees with
those early critics of Conrad who objected to the length of Marlow's spoken
narrative in Lord Jim. For the best of Conrad, says Leavis, we must go to the
later novel Nostromo.
Having taken Leavis into account, I will say little else about the
schools of criticism, other than to point, in the bibliography, to some of the
important critical writing on Conrad that has been done recently. All of the
modern critics treat Conrad's texts as sources for images and symbols. Thus,
Lillian Feder writes on Marlow's descent into Hell; Jerome Thale describes
Marlow's quest; R. W. Stallman describes The Secret Sharer as the
representation of two sides of the Captain's personality; and Dorothy Van
Ghent describes Lord Jim in terms of traditional character types in the
Classic Greek drama.
Conrad, Joseph, Works of Joseph Conrad: Critical Commentary., Monarch Notes, 01-01-1963.