The Moral Ambiguity of Conrad’s Poetics: Transgressive Secret Sharing in Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes YAEL LEVIN In a moment of self-reflexive lucidity, the narrator of Nabokov’s Pale Fire muses that “[w]indows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages” (93). The narrator’s words resonate with readers of Conrad, as a certain voyeurism clearly lies at the heart of his secret-sharing novel or short story. The intradiegetic narrator is always there, peering, observing, summing up, taking notes, a lone and often involved onlooker, a witness needing but not neces- sarily needed to commemorate. 1 One cannot subscribe to peering into windows, however, without an accompanying sense of ethical unease. An altogether different source of ethical unease is identified by Jakob Lothe in his book, Conrad’s Narrative Method. In an analysis of “The Secret Sharer,” Lothe claims that “the narrator’s striking impres- sion of similarity or even identity between himself and Leggatt blurs the moral issue” (62). The emphasis here is not on distance, but rather on the perverse proximity hatched in a doppelgänger drama. The game of doubling obscures the naked fact that, shunning the duty of his com- mand and the judicial system he has sworn to uphold, the captain aids a murderer in evading justice. Although in many ways contradictory, it is my contention that voyeurism and its associated detachment on the one hand, and dou- bling and its associated involvement, on the other, cohere in Conrad’s poetics where, as intimated by the title of “The Secret Sharer,” story- telling is the art of transgressing confidences. In my reading of Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes I will show that the storyteller is an acolyte who, as Jacques Derrida writes in his study of “Le Parjure,” “is an accomplice, a second, a suppleant who accompanies, but without accompanying altogether, in any event, at a certain distance. He is someone who, repeatedly, assists, but not without giving someone the slip a little” (215). The storyteller, then, is always already a spy, a Conradiana, vol. 39, no. 3, 2007 © Texas Tech University Press