Riassunto
Riassunto di Il compagno segreto
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love short, tense stories, sea fiction, and tales told from inside one troubled mind. It also suits anyone new to Conrad.
Che cos’è questo libro
The Secret Sharer is a novella by Joseph Conrad, written in 1909 and first printed in a magazine in 1910. Conrad spent twenty years at sea before he became a writer, and the book draws on what he knew of ships, of command and of the loneliness of a man who must decide alone. It runs to only a few dozen pages, yet it holds a full story of crime, secrecy and nerve.
The tale is told by a young captain in his first command. He is a stranger to his ship, his crew and, in a way, to himself. One quiet night at anchor he meets a man who should not be there, and he makes a choice that puts his authority, his reputation and his ship at risk. You get a close view of a mind under pressure, a sharp picture of life on a sailing vessel, and a question that stays with you: what do we owe a person who seems to be our own double? Let us begin with the ship and the young man who commands it.
In questo riassunto
- 1A young captain stands alone on deckFree
- 2An odd decision brings an odd discovery
- 3The swimmer tells his dangerous story
- 4Hiding a man in plain sight
- 5The other captain comes looking
- 6Doubles, secrets and the test of command
Punto chiave 1 di 6
A young captain stands alone on deck
The story opens at the head of the Gulf of Siam. A sailing ship lies at anchor near some low islands, and the narrator looks out over a calm sea. He is the new captain. He has held the post for only a short time, and he has never commanded a ship before. Nobody on board knew him before he came, and he did not know them.
He feels this keenly. The crew, he thinks, are watching to see what sort of man he is. His chief mate is older, fussy and full of fixed opinions, and the narrator suspects the man thinks he deserved the command himself. The captain wonders how he will measure up. He is not sure what he will do when real trouble comes, and he says so with a frankness that makes him easy to trust.
Conrad gives us this uncertainty before anything happens. The captain is a stranger to the ship in a plain sense, since he has not learned its habits. But he is also a stranger to the person he hopes to become, a master who is calm and sure. The tension of the whole book rests on that gap between the man he is and the man he wants to be.
The setting helps. A ship at anchor in a still sea has an odd, suspended feeling. The land is near but strange, the water is flat, and the night is hot and quiet. Conrad uses this stillness to shut the narrator into his own thoughts, so that the smallest sign of the outside world will feel like an event.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- The captain
- A young man in his first command, he narrates the tale and secretly shelters Leggatt from his crew.
- Leggatt
- The chief mate of the Sephora, he seeks shelter with the captain after swimming away from his ship.
- The chief mate
- The captain's older first officer is a fussy man whose fixed opinions deepen his commander's sense of isolation.
- The captain of the Sephora
- Leggatt's troubled commander visits the young captain while searching for his missing officer.
- The steward
- The captain's servant regularly enters his cabin, making the concealment of Leggatt difficult.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 17,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 1 h 10 min
- Listening time1 h 55 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 10 other languages
Questions about Il compagno segreto
What is The Secret Sharer about?
It is about a young sea captain on his first command who shelters a fugitive officer from another ship. The tale follows the secret he must keep, the risks he takes and what the stranger shows him about himself.
Who is the secret sharer in the story?
The secret sharer is Leggatt, the swimmer the captain hides in his cabin. He shares the captain's room and secret, and he also seems to share his nature, which is why the captain thinks of him as a double.
Is The Secret Sharer based on a true story?
Conrad was inspired by a real event on a ship, the Cutty Sark, where an officer killed a seaman and escaped. The tale itself is fiction. Conrad wrote it in 1909, and it appeared in 1910.
Is The Secret Sharer hard to read?
The language is rich and the sentences can be long, but the story is short and the plot is simple. Most readers find it easier than Conrad's longer novels, and it is a good first book by him.
What is the main message of The Secret Sharer?
The story suggests that to command others you must first know yourself, and that the people most like us can teach us who we are. It also asks when private loyalty should outweigh the law.