What we notice most about Decoud's description is the brutal contrariness of the narrator, who seems intent on stripping away for us Decoud's flattering illusions. The attack seems unjustified: as the novel progresses, Decoud's skepticism quickly emerges as much more than a "habit." Indeed, his suicide would be inexplicable -- if we believe what the narrator says here. We are justified, however, in examining such blatant narrative subjectivity further.

This introduction begins a deliberate narrative tension regarding Decoud, whose role in the novel is to waver between skepticism and idealism (the latter inspired by his love for Antonia). This wavering appears not only in his actions but in the narrator's assessment of which quality is "genuine" in him. Here, the "genuine impulses" mentioned are, we learn, his love for Antonia, while his skepticism is a mere "habit." Later, however, we will see the narrator calling the skepticism genuine, and the love a mere infatuation.

There is, furthermore, no reason to doubt that the young Decoud's skepticism began as a superficial, intellectually-chosen pose. Conrad is making a complex but crucial point here: that skepticism, though it claims to see through the delusion of all dream-ideals, is itself just such a deluding dream-ideal, an artifice assumed like any other.