In 1880, Conrad was part of the crew of the Cutty Sark. On this ship, Sidney Smith killed a black man, John Francis. The captain of the Cutty Sark secretly helped Smith to an American ship, the Colorado. Four days later, Smith committed suicide (Daleski 171). Smith had not wanted to be tried for his murder. This experience is particularly interesting when one compares it to Conrad's short story, "The Secret Sharer". Conrad directly used his knowledge of the occurrences aboard the Cutty Sark for that particular story.

In the 1860s, the hope of the peasantry in Russia and the surrounding area was that they were on the verge of a bloody revolt against the nobility and the autocracy (Freeze 192). Revolution was on the minds of many. By 1863, Poland began a revolution against Russia that would sadly end in failure (Polonia online). After the defeat, Tsar Nicholas "Russified" everything. The leaders of the revolution where tried for treason and killed. Other fighters of independence were sought out and sent into exile, most to Siberia (Polonia online/Jean- Aubry 26). The people lost hope.

Leggatt had committed murder on the Sephora, on which he was first mate. Not wanting to face a trial, he escaped. The captain and Leggatt form an immediate bond (Conrad 702). Comparing the two, they are both of the same stature, same background. The captain even refers to Leggatt as his "double", "other self", or "secret sharer" almost 40 times (Graver 152). Conrad specifically implies that Leggatt is a doppelganger, or the captain's double.

Conrad seriously began his writing four years after he had left the sea. His influence on later novelists has been profound. He is the novelist of man in extreme situations. "Those who read me," he wrote in his preface to A Personal Record, "know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity (A.I.P.C. online). For Conrad, fidelity is the barrier man erects against nothingness, against corruption, against the evil that is all about him, waiting to engulf him, and that in some sense is within him unacknowledged. But what happens when fidelity is submerged, the barrier broken down, and the evil without in acknowledged by the evil within? At his greatest, that is Conrad's theme. The captain finally recognized the evil within him when Leggatt, his doppelganger, left. When he does so, he also finds the piece of himself that he needed to become a real commander on his ship. In other words, when he came to terms with the evil in himself, he transformed the destruction of "self" into the discovery of self (Daleski 171)

After the death of his father, Joseph was given into the care of his maternal grandmother. His uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, was in charge of his education. When Joseph s

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Approximate Word count = 1595
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)