The entry into the novel of the skeptic Decoud leads immediately to a scene about disillusionment, and people's efforts to remain within their dream-ideals regardless. The context is the embarkation of troops for an enormously important battle, led by the patently untrustworthy Barrios. The characters -- primarily Mrs Gould and Don Jose Avellanos -- are shown struggling to maintain confidence and faith in their cause. By the end of the chapter even Giorgio, the stubborn apostle of Liberty, has lost some faith in his ideal. Disillusionment in Nostromo is a powerful and complex theme: it represents the victory of intelligence over the false, dangerous and tragic dream-ideals that rule and destroy our lives, but its price is to reveal an underlying reality of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

At another level, and adding to the disillusionment, this chapter advances the theme of Separatism by showing the divergent motives behind the supposedly unified party of material interests. Mrs Gould, whose ideal of progress is altruistic, is shaken by Barrios' ideal of money-making, then Scarfe's ideal of personal "pull."

The chapter builds to a damning indictment of progress as just another form of conquering dream-ideal, with power as its goal and armies as its means, no more benevolent in its essentials than the outright plunder of the conquistadors.