Nostromo

Nostromo

Nostromo commands the cargadores of the Sulaco docks, a Man of the People who disdains to lead but rules from within, prized by the Europeans precisely because he seems above their intrigues. His immense vanity and his obscure sense of his own greatness drive him to attempt feats no one else will, yet he resents being used as a tool by men he privately scorns as hombres finos. When the revolution forces the silver and the fate of the town onto his shoulders, that private pride becomes the hinge on which the whole story turns.

Martin Decoud

Decoud drifts through Sulaco's drawing rooms as a detached, cosmopolitan observer, mocking the patriotism of men like Don Jose while secretly loving Antonia Avellanos and half-despising himself for it. His intellect is his only weapon, and he knows it, which is why he is so unnerved when he is sent out into the black calm of the Placid Gulf on a desperate errand with Nostromo, where no intelligence can help him. His complacent superiority and his sudden, unwilling commitment make him the story's most modern and most exposed consciousness.

Charles Gould

Gould is the foreign proprietor on whom Sulaco's material hopes rest, a man of rigid principle who believes the mine can redeem the country by giving it something solid to build on. His marriage to Emilia is affectionate but increasingly shadowed by the mine, which he serves with a devotion that looks less like business than like fate. As the revolution closes in, his determination to save the silver at any cost becomes the engine of the novel's central crisis.

Emilia Gould

Dona Emilia presides over the Casa Gould as its gracious and observant mistress, the confidante of priests, doctors, and revolutionaries alike, and the one person in Sulaco who seems to understand what the mine is doing to the people around it. Her compassion for the town's suffering and her growing loneliness within her marriage give the novel its moral center. As the political storm gathers, her clear eyes and unspoken grief register what the men of action cannot or will not see.

Dr. Monygham

Dr. Monygham moves through Sulaco's society with a snarl and a limp, a physician whose past torture under Guzman Bento has left him with a horror of hanging and a carefully cultivated air of contempt. He adores Emilia Gould in secret, with a pitying tenderness he can never speak, and his hatred of the mine's moral cost is as sharp as his loyalty to the people caught in its wake. When the crisis comes, this apparent misanthrope proves capable of the coldest and most necessary courage in the book.

Captain Mitchell

Captain Mitchell bustles through Sulaco's crises with the self-importance of a man who believes he is at the center of events, signing papers, giving orders, and narrating his own heroism to anyone who will listen. Nostromo manages him with weary contempt, winding the old seaman around his little finger while fearing his indiscretion. His fussy vanity is comic, but it also measures the gap between the Europeans' self-image and the real forces moving beneath them.