These passages inside Sotillo's head blur the narrative and personal voices to an extent unseen elsewhere in the novel, presenting Sotillo's thoughts and even verbalizations without quotes or attribution, as part of the narrative flow. The technique is common enough in light literature, and used to humorous effect here, but the result is a sudden popularization of the novel's tone. I believe that this is no accident on Conrad's part, and no coincidence that we are about to get a scene of unsually gratuitous, almost popularized violence. If one compares the blurring of voice here with the control in Sotillo's earlier scene , and the narrative licentiousness of Hirsch's torture with the narrative remove for Monygham's torture , one will see that this section must involve in its own way a controlled tone, with its own purpose.

The purpose is found by recalling the frame: we are still inside the reversed Plato's cave, the metaphor by which Conrad is expressing the ugliness of the higher world, and this flashback comes in answer to a question posed by the resident professor of cynicism about the origins of a violent act. What we are seeing here is, to borrow Plato's term, the very Form of the ugly world, and to fully express it Conrad has chosen the sloppy and gratuitous form of popular literature. When the flashback ends and we return to Nostromo and Monygham, so too will return the former narrative control.