CHAPTER 17: THE CHAMELEON’S MASK — when “Somebody” and “Nobody” trade places

Milena Oreshkova
Oct 12
3 min read

“God had created man…” — with breath, with possibility, with a code for freedom. And yet, in a world of fame, money, and hierarchies, someone taught us that a Somebody is the one at the top—and the rest are Nobodies. That myth is a mask. In Chapter 17, Melina Orea cracks it open—through memory, guilt, and a protagonist who masters the chessboard of other people’s lives yet loses access to his own soul.

The spark: when does a “Somebody” stop being human?

In an interview, the author says the trigger for this chapter was the arrogant formula “When I was a nobody…” spoken by an Olympic champion. In the novel, that formula becomes a knife: the fame–power–money metric is dismantled inside Nathanael’s inner lab—icy reason, surgical analysis, and profound isolation.

“Memories. My curse. My salvation… they were my only coffin, my last fortress.”

His memory is a “forged-steel safe”—it sounds like a superpower, but it’s also a cell. The book asks: what’s the price of being a Somebody if you pay with your capacity to feel?

The mask as “career”

The summit is often built from masks. Nathanael knows this and turns it into a method: micro-expressions, algorithms, zugzwang. But each winning move removes something human.

“My voice—calm, almost bored, like the surface of a frozen lake beneath which an abyss sleeps.”

“No one knew for sure… Chameleon—just another mask, changed by need.”

Here, “success” is a sterile operating room: clean, precise, bloodless—and heartless. Orea’s diagnosis: control without love is a form of self-destruction.

“Nobody” whispers “I love you”

The counterpoint is Melina. Her “I love you” collides with a reply that measures timbre and decibels. It reveals a chasm: to hear love as “frequency data” is to swap meaning for measurement.

“Instead of feeling the meaning… Because I was a mask. And that mask was suffocating me.”

Chapter 17 reframes Somebody: a Somebody is the one who can be vulnerable; a Nobody is the one who knows everything about the world but not where his own heart is.

Anatomy of manipulation

The Senator, Elizabeth, Edward—three mirrors of the same disease: power without conscience. Nathanael “wins” them all, yet every checkmate erases a trace of humanity.

“Zugzwang, Senator?”“She wasn’t crying. She was bargaining.”“I am merely an observer.”

These lines don’t glorify the cold mind—they indict it. The “winner” ends up judged by his own truths: the mask has fused to the face.

God, the Image, and the failure of the “overman”

One of the strongest passages:

“God made man in His image and likeness… breathed a divine spark into him… but people are pitifully timid… I was above that. I ruled the world…”

This is where the hero self-diagnoses: pride is the drug of the ‘Somebody’. The collapse that follows isn’t external punishment—it’s an inner mirror.

“Now I am the one who is sentenced… And my mask… it is shattered.”

Why this chapter matters

It breaks the myth of “success” as status and shows it as ethical architecture—or the lack of it.
It asks who “Somebody” is not in rankings, but in the capacity to carry love without turning it into a scheme.
It gives language to modern masks: analysis as armor, memory as prison, control as self-sabotage.

Conclusion: take off the chameleon

Chapter 17 doesn’t ask you to love Nathanael—it asks you to recognize your own masks. To see where “success” became a refusal of the human. And to accept that you are Somebody when you stop lying to your heart.