Cloaking Oneself

In the "Secret Sharer" the captain decides to hide Leggatt for many possible reasons. To better understand the captain?s decision one must first take a deeper look at the captain himself. The Captain, a young inexperienced leader, takes charge of men of whom he has never worked with before. He wants to earn the respect and camaraderie of his new crew. In several circumstances he exhibits extremely eccentric behavior. For instance, to gain the crew's favor he works the late night shift. On this fateful watch he miraculously finds Leggatt climbing up the ships ladder.
The captain empathizes and identifies with Leggatt, the fugitive that swam naked to the ship's ladder. Many physical pieces of evidence can be found to support that Leggatt as merely a hallucination and in fact he was the "doppelganger" of the Captain, this means he was the captains other or inner self. The crew never found evidence of the stole-away, nor did any one hear the stole away. Leggatt never made an audible noise which the crew could overhear during his conversations with the captain, but the captain was heard speaking Leggatt.
Other more symbolic evidence of Leggatt?s non-existence stands out. Leggatt?s head lacked a discreption, which indicates that the Captain and Leggatt were of one mind. Another interesting detail was that Leggatt was said to be swimming naked in the water, and this often may be taken to mean he rose up out of the elements of the deep sea or ones subconscious. All of these indicate that the captain manifested this man Leggatt out of his loneliness and needed someone to converse with as he was finding out about himself. So the captain imagined being of his subconscious that in fact was his own personality in reverse. As he learned more about himself the captain matured. Leggatt foreshadowed this when described having a greenish glow. This light shows that some good wills comes through him, and this good turns out to be the captain?s maturation as a person.
In conclusion, through the discussion of the facts and the actual text, Leggatt as hallucination symbolizes the captain's inner self. To further this thesis, the captain and the ship remained nameless in order to show them as generic people like you and me. Therefore the captain's hallucination of Leggatt is actually an introspective look at himself.