Book Reviews - Review 317

Though short, this is a very clever and intricate story. The narrator relates his experience as a young sailor taking on his first captaincy in the East Indes, at short notice and working with a crew with which he is unacquainted. As the ship sets out, he feels mildly apprehensive but confident of his ability to handle the responsibility. Then a strange occurrence plunges him into a psychological dilemma and a test of nerves. A young man catches hold of the ship's ladder, which has been left hanging over the hull, and boards the ship. His story is that he murdered a man on his last voyage in a fit of rage, and is fleeing justice. The captain feels a strong liking for the fugitive, Leggatt, and after lending him his spare sleeping suit begins to consider him his "double". They are the only two men on board the ship who do not know the crew, and the captain agrees to hide Leggatt in his cabin. Tense episodes ensue, as the captain's nervously erratic behaviour starts to arouse the suspicion of the other sailors.

The symbolism of the story runs deep, Conrad making absolutely clear that Leggatt is to be interpreted as a personification of the captain's "dark side". Although there is no reason to suppose that the captain has done anything wrong before the episode, he feels somehow that to hand over the fugitive to the law would be to deny something of his companion that he finds mirrored in himself. There are numerous Biblical references, particularly to the story of Cain and Abel, in which Cain is punished for murdering his brother not by human justice, but by being forced to live as an outcast.

A superficial interpretation of the story might be as a moralistic assertion of the need to acknowledge the evil in ourselves, and by extension to refuse to place ourselves in the position of judge over our fellow men. But I felt the work to have a more ambivalent character. The captain seems, on one level, to be rebelling not merely against fallible, conventional human justice, but against the very metaphysical principle of justice. Leggatt acknowledges his crime, and feels no remorse for it: he argues that the man he murdered was "unworthy", and that the world is a better place without him. Yet isn't this to deny the unworthy man the opportunity - however theoretical - of self-redemption? The fugitive claims for himself the right to judge the world, by his own harsh and brutal critria, but denies the world the right to judge him. This is simple bad faith: a rejection of the moral consequences of one's actions.

Does the captain, understanding that Leggatt acted out of temper, want to give him the second chance that society would deny him? I don't think so. Since Leggatt does not regard his crime as wrong, he might as well have committed it in cold blood. Conrad works hard at portraying his anti-hero sympathetically, but I struggled, from an objective standpoint, to find much that was admirable in either his, or the captain's, behaviour. If we are supposed to take at face value Leggatt's belief in his righteousness, the story is divested of much moral force. One compares his attitude with that of another literary wrongdoer, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov never claims moral superiority, or denies others the right to judge him; his flight from justice is a kind of macabre game whose outcome either way he will accept without complaint.

This is an unsettling work, whose moral relativism I found hard to agree with. But it is superbly written, and its artistry is undeniable.