In Nostromo's pessimistic view, the choice offered us is either idealism, being a suffocatingly banal fiction by which we may live, or skepticism, being a true look at the reality of ultimate futility, from which we die. This chapter brutally counterposes the two alternatives, in the form of Captian Mitchell's "historical" narrative followed by Decoud's suicide at the Great Isabel.

Mitchell's history constitutes the second major usurpation of the narrative voice, the first being Decoud's letter in Chapter 2-7. In this one we jump ahead to a time when the Occidental Republic has been established, the material interests have triumphed, and "history" has become a sanitized, organized lecture delivered by a pompous tour guide, in which all ends well and all loose ends have been tied up. To resolve the novel's suspense in this manner, after building up the military situation for chapters, is a jaw-dropping anticlimax by which Conrad makes us feel the frustration of all the unsatisfying illusions that, in Dr Monygham's words, "make the world go round." The technique also calls attention to the fact that this is not purely an adventure novel, and the true climax is to be looked for in character growth and allegorical meaning.

Materially, the modern Sulaco bears out the most optimistic capitalist prophesies of Charles Gould. The triumph of the material interests has brought prosperity, growth and trade; the rule of law has been established; the Parliamentary govermnent of Don Juste Lopez is infinitely preferable to the tyranny of Guzman Bento. Those readers fishing for a socialist polemic here will be baffled, and are likely to make too much of little hints, such as the secret gatherings of the proletarian opposition. More telling images are those of the sentries flanking the Bank, and the disappearance of the statue of Charles IV. The real historical verdict offered through Mitchell's complacent narrative is that in the modern world, the reality of continuing human antagonism has been pushed underground on all sides -- the rulers' conquests no less than the people's revolt -- to present a smiling outer face not unlike Mitchell's narrative itself.

In stark opposition to this world stands Decoud's suicide, one of the most famous and haunting passages in the novel, in which Decoud, driven by solitude into "the exile of utter unbelief," loses every sustaining illusion, including that of his own individuality, and sinks himself in the Placid Gulf, the San Tomé silver stripped of every symbolic dream-ideal and functioning only as dead weight.