The Secret Sharer: the essay In the long short story The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad the narrator plays the captain of a merchant ship that is foreign to him. He is assigned to this foreign ship on a very short notice. He is expected to lead the crew to their destination, safely. This captain is lonely he has not one soul to speck to. He doesn’t know these people who he somehow is suppose to lead. His first night on the ship he finds his soon to be best friend, Leggatt. He finds his new best friend mysteriously floating in the water as if he was dead. He speaks to him for the night and finds that they have fallen asleep in his room. The captain doesn’t even realize he had been sleeping. The narrator listens to the man explain why he had been floating in the water and then realize that him and the man have plenty in common, both mentally and physically. The narrator feels connected to the man. Leggatt is being hunted for. He is being hunted for murder and also for going against the order of the captain of the Sephora, which is the ship, he was also assigned to. The stowaway is so much like the captain. For the captain Leggatt represents a goal that the captain has set out to accomplish. He knows this man is a good man as well as he is a good man. He sees himself in Leggatt and therefore wants to help him. One might ask why the captain would go out to far lengths to save this mans life. For one the captain is lonely and is lusting for some excitement, secondly he would h...
Conrad experienced a tremendous amount of psychological pain because of the loss he felt, he had no one to talk to about the death of his brother and best friend in the boating accident which resulting in a suicide attempt. The relationships he had with his mother Beth and his swim team friends suffered dramatically because of all of the pain he held
Some of the most intriguing stories of today are about people’s adventures at sea and the thrill and treachery of living through its perilous storms and disasters. Two very popular selections about the sea and its terrors are The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger and “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Longfellow. Comparison between the two works determines that “The Wreck of the Hesperus” tells a more powerful sea-disaster story for several different reasons. The poem is more descriptive and suspenseful than The Perfect Storm, and it also plays on a very powerful tool to captivate the reader’s emotion. These key aspects combine to give the reader something tangible that allows them to relate to the story being told and affects them strongly.
People can carry many things with them as they go through life. Individuals can carry tools to do their jobs, knowledge to aid in a successful outcome of a task, or even guilt of something that happened on their watch. These are some of the struggles that Tim O’Brien’s the main character has to deal with, in the story “The Things They Carried” because the character is the leader of a military unit. O’Brien’s main character is plagued throughout the story by a fantasy romance that constantly distracts the character First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and causes a terrible tragedy. Like the main character of O’Brien’s story, I to had a distraction in the place in which I was employed, and it also caused a terrible tragedy as well. Both O’Brien’s character
The captain is characterized as incompetent even at sailing a ship despite his title. The captain should have been the one to lead the castaways but his incompetence caused the island dwellers to despise him. Ten years after being marooned on the island, “the captain become a very boring person, without enough to think about, without enough to do.”(294). Trying to find a purpose to his boring life, the captain hovered around a spring, the island’s only water supply. He would tell the kanka-bono girls the kind of mood the spring was in on that day despite the fact that “The dribbling [from the spring] was in fact quite steady, and had been for thousands of years”(295). The kanka-bono girls did not speak english and therefore the captain’s attempt at humanising the spring were lost on the girls making it a completely pointless endeavor. Moreover,If not for the lack of tools on the island, the captain would have tried to improve the springs and consequently might have clogged it(296) potentially putting the life of castaways at risk. The captain was desperate to find a purpose to his mundane life on the island, so much that he was willing to put his and the island’s inhabitant 's life at risk. The captain’s attempt at accomplishing something to find a purpose in his life was useless and even
In “The Handsomest Drowned Man”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses the drowned man to develop his message that even though individuals may not know someone directly, they can still have an impact on their life. For instance, after the islanders had found the drowned man and prepared him for burial, they proceeded to create an intriguing personality for him. Due to this creation of personality, the islanders noticed how drab and boring their lives and surroundings were. So, they proceeded to brighten the world around them by planting flowers, reconstructing their homes, and painting them. These islanders created a wonderful personality of the drowned man and observed
The reading of “The Boat” by Alistair Macleod is an interesting and sad story that displays many elements figuratively and literally. The first figurative element is the boat. At a literal perspective, the boat is used for fishing and boat rides, although these are not the only things that the boat represents. We learn that the father in some way, as been sacrificing his working life for his family, for something that he doesn’t absolutely love. This shows that he is in some way trapped, or imprisoned. The boat displays
The Seafarer highlites the transience of wordly joys which are so little important and the fact thet we have no power in comparison to God.
Hiding from those who would find him and carry out the wrath of vengeance upon him, the protagonist plans his escape. About to dive in the rancid water and swim for it, a body in the shallows abruptly stops him. The bloated and decomposing corpse pulls the narrator back from his adrenaline-induced frenzy. After a few moments, he settles and reflects, “I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back” (193). The narrator can almost envision himself as the man whose corpse is before him. Both deceased from mysterious causes, involved in shady activities, and left to rot in the stagnant lake water, and never to be discovered by the outside world. This marks the point where the main character is the closest he has ever been to death. Although he makes it out alive, the protagonist and his outlook on life are forever changed.
ship, knowing full well that he boards to go to his death. This brings about
“Our experiences shapes who we are.” These simple words summarize the solid connection translated throughout “Heart of Darkness” and “The Things They Carried.” In both written novels, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad and “Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” from The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien share a similar perspective in revealing dark transformation individuals utilize to cope with new environments. In fact, a new habitat proceeds with new outlook because of the transformation of thoughts. Thoughts depict the concealed action that character wants to achieve. Mary Anna and Kurtz’s dramatic transformation illustrates the destruction of individualism and humanity through actions reflecting thoughts.
Every individual has a biological influence on their development; two individuals combine their genetic information to create a new organism, carrying biological predispositions that will shape their expressed behaviors and characteristics. However, Susan Griffin, author of the essay “Our Secret,” argues that while genetic influences are significant, they are not the sole contributors to an individual’s development. Throughout her essay, Griffin reveals to her readers that the presence of external, uncontrollable factors from an individual’s environment can be equally influential as they diverge the individual off of the predetermined path of life created by biological factors.
The reader finds an initial parallel between the myth and story through Conrad's 'sea,' as compared to Orpheus' 'underworld,' along with the surface of the quest motif. The ship in "The Secret Share" is described as "at the starting point of a long journey" (Conrad 273), and as being "very still in an immense stillness.... [where] nothing moved, [and] nothing lived" (273). I read the stillness of the sea and the absence of life is an allusion to the stillness of death, which is the realm Orpheus takes his journey to, before turning homeward. Moreover, the stars are described in this opening scene, but do not reappear in the story until after the departure of 'the secret sharer'; the narrator's Euridice or hidden self (this hidden self aspect closely reflects the 'double' nature of the 'sharer' as well). Between these two appearances of the stars, which could only visible in an 'overworld,' the ship and its crew as consumed by "the tide of darkness" (273) that encompasses the vessel, much as Orpheus leaves behind the stars when he descends into the realm of death in Hades.
After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement to the land that he cultivated,” and was forced “to work under any conditions” that his landowner enforced (Wilson 798). Many landowners viewed sharecropping as a way to elude the now barred possession of slaves while still maintaining field hands for labor in an inexpensive and ample manner. The landowners watched over the sharecroppers and their every move diligently, with harsh supervision, and pressed the sharecroppers to their limits, both mentally and physically. Not only were the sharecroppers just given an average of one-fourth of their harvest, they had “one of the most inadequate incomes in the United States, rarely surpassing more than a few hundred dollars” annually (Wilson 30). Under such trying conditions, it is not hard to see why the sharecroppers struggled to maintain a healthy and happy life, if that could even be achieved. Due to substandard conditions concerning sharecropper’s clothing, insufficient food supplies, and hazardous health issues, sharecroppers competed on the daily basis to stay alive on what little their landowners had to offer them.
Towards the beginning of the poem, the author Jungmin used an aggrieved and ambivalent tone throughout the story to make the reader have sympathy for the speaker. She successfully creates this tone by using words such as sinking, wrong, clumsy, alien. These words from the poem are very relatable to people in real life when they are in a dark spot in their life, thus making them feel sympathy for the speaker in the poem. By creating this common place between the reader and
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be expected), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze…. (Miller 68)