Conrad's The Shadow-Line

The qualities of leadership described by Joseph Conrad in the short novel The Shadow-Line are rooted in the ability of the individual to be a leader of himself. That is, the lesson to be learned by Captain Giles and the narrator is a lesson having to do first with the mastery of the self, and only second with the leadership of others. Before a man (the story deals only with men) can lead other men, he must first learn to lead himself. Before he can lead himself, he must know himself. Therefore, the story is a tale of men journeying through the turbulent seas of the self as much as it is a tale of men journeying through the turbulent (or sometimes unnervingly calm) seas of the external world.

In the first place, Conrad makes clear again and again that leadership is something to be mightily desired, particularly by the narrator and Captain Giles: "As soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained . . . a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomotion" (28). The narrator declares that "Command is a strong magic" (29). The question the book deals with is what a man does once he takes over the leadership of a ship and the men on it. To Conrad, such a magical and turbulent situation gives a man the chance to discover himself, his morality, his very soul. Conrad gives no indication that there is anything intrinsically dangerous with leadership. What is dangerous is a leader who does not know and command himself.

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ngs him for the first time into the community: "And I felt ashamed of having been passed over by the fever . . . in order that my remorse might be the more bitter, the feeling of unworthiness more poignant, and the sense of responsibility heavier to bear" (117). Back ashore, he runs into Giles again, who tells him that "a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience. . . You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted" (132). The narrator has been shaken by confronting his own moral failings, and the suggestion is that he will be a better leader because of that new and painful self-knowledge. Bibliography Conrad, Joseph. The Shadow-Line. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Doris Lessing, in her novel The Fifth Child, uses a folk-tale motif to explore the breakdown of the values embodied by the traditional nuclear family. What she seems to be arguing is that these values and this traditional nuclear family were illusions in the first place, and their "breakdown" is in fact merely an exposure of that illusion. The use of the folk-tale motif may be seen as the author's attempt to portray the Lovatt family as an entirely unreal entity. Lessing's dismissal or denial of the reality of the values

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