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In this article, we offer a reading of an “uncanny” short story by Julien Green, “Leviathan or La traversée inutile”, the most “Jamesian” of the collection Voya­ger on Earth which contains five stories written in his youth by this American–French (naturalized) author. We have focused on the theme of the private world of the character of the voyager compared with the “anthropological” curiosity of Captain Suger, a real sea wolf who acts as a psychologist and harrasses the hero, who for his part is almost mute and inaccessible, with the aim of dragging his secret and his inner truth out of him. Once the (open) secret has been confessed, the captain nonetheless remains empty-handed, and the reader is free to imagine everything and to indulge in all sorts of hypotheses. The structure of the narrative evokes not only the masterpieces of Henry James but also other authors of the modern novel and other famous texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the relationship between one character who is obsessed by the will to know and another who is closed and reticent is important from the narrative and meta-narrative point of view.