61 pages • 2 hours read
Laila LalamiThe Moor's Account
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Mustafa
Mustafa is a highly intelligent man with a talent for adapting to many different situations, cultures, and roles. As a boy in North Africa, he’s more interested in skipping school to go to the souq than studying the Qur’an. When he’s apprenticed to a family of merchants, he learns quickly and becomes successful. As a slave in Seville, he is quiet and obedient, but he also listens and observes. In the new world, he is an outsider to both the Castilians and the natives. His ability to quickly learn new languages enables him to act as a translator between the Castilians and the native tribes. He also uses the negotiation skills he developed as a merchant to negotiate between them. Later, he becomes a shaman who is renowned for his cures.
During his exile in the new world, Mustafa feels great longing for his family and his hometown of Azemmur. He feels enormous regret for the mistakes he’s made in life, including becoming a merchant against his father’s wishes, participating in the slave trade, ignoring his mother when she begged him not to sell himself into slavery, and stealing food and water from the natives. In addition, he regrets finding the shard of Castilian glass that leads to the enslavement of his native followers. His Muslim faith teaches him that he will be judged for his sins, and he feels that his trials are his punishment.
Like his mother before him, Mustafa is a storyteller. He uses his storytelling to free himself from the Castilians and their mission to the Seven Cities. By the end of the book, he’s fulfilled his father’s wish and become an official recorder by telling his account of the expedition.
Dorantes
Dorantes is a Castilian gentleman who buys the enslaved Mustafa. He is an ambitious man who leaves his comfortable life in Seville to seek fame and fortune in the new world.
Dorantes doesn’t show much affection to his younger brother Diego during the expedition, preferring the company of his young friend Castillo. But when Diego is killed, Dorantes is inconsolable.
When living among the natives, Dorantes adopts their customs and marries a native woman who bears him a daughter. Far from the colonial world, he ceases to care about the distinctions of status that apply in that world, and he and the officially enslaved Mustafa become equals. He promises that, if they ever get back to New Spain, he will give Mustafa his official freedom. When he arrives in New Spain, however, he quickly reverts to his old ways. He abandons his native wife and daughter to marry a rich widow. In addition, despite his promises, he never sets Mustafa free.
Pánfilo de Narváez
Narváez is the leader of the expedition, and his rash decisions and inflexible attitude doom the crew. His first act upon arriving in La Florida is to order that four Indigenous captives be whipped until they reveal where he can find gold. This combination of unthinking cruelty and greed represents the totality of his character, and they set the expedition on a dangerous path from the start. The captives tell Narváez that the gold they are carrying came from a place called Apalache, and Narváez then develops a stubborn belief that this place contains as much gold as El Dorado. His obstinate quest to reach and subdue Apalache leads to the splintering and decimation of his crew.
Narváez’s death aligns with the greedy and thoughtless manner in which he lives. Having traveled downriver on a makeshift raft with several crewmembers, he becomes worried about the raft’s stability and orders the crewmembers to travel on foot while he remains on the raft. The raft is then swept out to sea in a storm, and Narváez presumably drowns. The fact that the expedition bears his name despite his total lack of leadership is a testament to the rigid hierarchies that dominate the European colonial world, in which Narváez’s position as the expedition’s official captain matters more than who displays actual leadership.
Cabeza de Vaca
Initially described as calm, earnest, and sincere, Cabeza de Vaca sides with Narváez when he makes the fateful decision to split their party in two. Later, he falls in love with a native woman and marries her.
Although he worries that his story will never be told when living among Indigenous peoples, as the highest-ranking member of the survivors, he is the one who tells the official story of their ill-fated expedition. In this account, he changes the details to make himself the hero, blaming all the expedition’s failures on Narváez. He is the only one of the four survivors who returns to Spain. He does so as a wealthy hero.
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By Laila Lalami
