What is the good life? What is its opposite? These are questions to which no two men will give the same answers. In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much.
-- René (chapter 1 paragraph 1)

Importance: Here, René introduces the theme of ambiguous meaning into the novel. At this point, the reader does not know that René himself will struggle between the "good life," that is, his life with Suchitra, and "its opposite," his affair with Vasilia. In this way, René the narrator, in retrospect, reveals the struggle that René as a character will undergo.

... I would tell Suchitra what I was doing and she would ask the tough questions. 'I understand that you want your 'Nero Golden' to be something of a mystery man, that's fine, I see that that's right,' she told me. 'But what...
-- Suchitra and René (chapter 1 paragraph 1)