He is a self-styled ‘man of the People’ who ‘does not want to raise himself above the mass’. He thrives on reputation, but has no ideals beyond himself. Nostromo: the title character, real name Gian’ (or Giovanni) Battista Fizanda.

His wife, Emilia Gould, looks on while her husband becomes more successful in redeeming the business, and less successful in managing his personal life and marriage. Along with his friend Don José Avellanos (a fellow idealist), he supports Don Vincente Ribiera’s dictatorship. Gould pins his hopes on ‘material interests’, believing that the way to save the town of Sulaco from lawlessness is to set up a thriving economic structure.īut he is an idealist because he believes that, in setting up a thriving economic town, Sulaco will become a better place. His father, who was coerced into running the Concession, warned his son, before he died, to have nothing to do with the silver mine, but Gould, an idealist, believes he can make Costaguana a better place if he can use the mine to bring prosperity to the land.

The following character summaries, while brief, may help to separate some of the principal characters out into separate entities, as it can prove a challenge upon a first read to keep track of who’s who:Ĭharles Gould: the novel’s protagonist (of sorts), working on the ‘Gould Concession’, or silver mine, which he has inherited from his father (the same Concession also killed his father). Conrad is, in part, laying bare such common storytelling devices. Is he seeking to undermine the implicit message of much nineteenth-century fiction, namely that novels were about charting a journey of improvement (in Bildungsromans, for instance: Pip in Great Expectations becomes a wiser man, Jane Eyre ends up with Mr Rochester)?Īnother purpose served by the anachronic structure of the novel’s narrative (‘anachronic’ is Gerard Genette’s term and refers to narratives which are told out of sequential order, or with much recourse to flashback to past events and anticipation of future events) is that it allows Conrad to link together symbolically certain events or moments in the novel which he could not otherwise have connected together so easily, if telling the story in a consecutive fashion.

Sulaco conrad