Decoud's maddening evasiveness conveys his "excitement" warring with
his pose of general "nonchalance" as he is forced into political action.
His bit of badinage here is almost a microcosm of the character and the novel's
theme. When asked to assign objective value to something, he first declares it
"worthless" (the skeptical viewpoint), then grudgingly admits the human
need to assign value ("if I must define them"), and finally ends
with open-ended pessimism ("I would say bad"). In Nostromo even
short passages like this are freighted with the novel's guiding spirit.