Joseph Conrad's story, "The Secret Sharer," is about a captain of a ship who has a doppelganger come aboard who creates tension. On the one hand, the narrator wishes to uphold the law and maintain order. Leggatt alternatively represents the outlaw and by doing so a conflict emerges. The conflict spreads throughout the narrative as the captain himself turns and becomes an outlaw to protect the stowaway. There is a lot of ambiguity regarding the nature of the naked man's crime, and whether or not the captain's doppelganger really exists irrespective of the captain's consciousness. The paradox emerges between the captain's drive to maintain order through lawlessness, namely can he better enforce the law by breaking it? While these elements of tension, paradox, and ambiguity seem to dislocate the reader from engaging completely with the text, ultimately it helps reveal the unconscious operating in the narrator and from the tensions a new self emerges. The reader is able to examine the captain's growth from the inside out rather than from the outside in. At the beginning, the very nature of the captain's emergence as leader of the crew is ambiguous. The narrator explains: “In consequence of certain events of no particular significance, except to myself, I had been appointed to the command only a fortnight before.” (Conrad 26) From an analytic view of the narrative this seems to be a paradox. The captain is thrust into the position of leadership but the reader is not told why, or what motivates him. Further, he seems potentially unfit for leadership, and this creates uncertainty in his mind. He is not sure whether his first mate will follow his orders and hopes that he “turns out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” (Conrad 26) This would suggest that his personality is not fixed, his rank within the crew is not certain yet. He presumably has notions of reaching the top of the hierarchy as most individuals do, especially in the Bildungsroman genre. But the ambiguous nature of his fortuitous emergence as captain threatens to unravel the law and order on the ship composed mostly of veterans worthy of their salt. The Sephora is simultaneously docking near the shore and from it Leggatt arrives at the captain's ship. The nature that he shows up at the ship is just as ambiguous and uncertain as the captain's emergence to power. He reveals himself stealthily the captain and then comes aboard naked. The contradicti