The dialogue in this chapter is entertaining purely on the surface level of Nostromo trying to keep the silver a secret, but it also carries more. The metaphor of Plato's cave set up this room as the fundamental truth about the universe -- revealed as a cynical truth of torture and death. Monygham's claim that Sotillo, the torturer, knows "everything" was a claim that there is no further truth than this cynical one. Nostromo, the innocent man, made a passionate denial of that cynical view. He now opposes it with the survival of two braided facts that Sotillo assumes gone: Nostromo himself (which he mentions) and the silver (which he does not mention, but which we hear as surely as if he had). Symbolically, this amounts to saying, "Dreams are not dead, as the cynical viewpoint thinks; they survive, and specifically in relation to me," i.e., the People.

From here through the rest of this dialogue, Nostromo's efforts to keep the silver secret from Monygam correspond to the People concealing their knowledge of inner worth from the exploiting society and the cynical viewpoint.