Check out any Conrad book, and you'll find a lot of emphasis on people's appearances. There could be several reasons for this. For starters, Conrad might have felt that you could tell a lot about a person from their looks. Also, the spread of this crazy new technology called photography —you may have heard of it—might have inspired Conrad to be more and more descriptive when creating a character in the eyes of his readers. In any case, people's appearances figure strongly in this story and often tell us a lot about how our narrator's feeling at the moment he's describing them.
Questions About Appearances
- Do you think the narrator's descriptions of people's appearances tell us more about those people or the narrator himself? Why?
- How does the narrator describe Leggatt's appearance? What does it tell us about the narrator's state of mind?
- How do you think the captain appears to his crew? Do we ever get any solid proof that they don't like him? Where?
Chew on This
In "The Secret Sharer," we find that judging people by their appearances can be a dangerous mistake.
In "The Secret Sharer," Conrad shows us that appearances almost always show us the true side of a person's character.