(no subject)

"Memory" doesn't seem to me to be a theme, but a subject matter (just as, say, time-travel is a subject matter). "All of life is a fragmentary memory, even as we are living it" would be a theme. Wolfe repeats tropes over and over--tricks with memory and memory palaces, resureections and wars, killing one's friends (I often find myself wondering who, exactly, Wolfe killed that he feels so guilty about it--perhaps he's working through war guilt, or possibly he just finds it a fascinating subject), stage-acting, and so forth. The equally brilliant John Crowley returns again and again to a few well-defined themes--the past is fundamentally different from the present and the present is constantly fundamentally changing into the future; the entire world is a palace of memory. Wolfe is more varied. Yes, memory features prominently in The Book of the New Sun and the Soldier novels (and in so many smaller works) but in very different ways; I would say that its role in The Book of the Long Sun is, while certainly not absent, much less central and not in a thematic continuum with either of those. More central to Wolfe's work is his ideal of heroism, which is a remarkable mixture of self-determination and self-sacrifice. The degree to which his characters are refined by suffering, but never lose sight of the fact that their heroism is grounded in a need to protect their friends and their world. (Of course, that doesn't fit Alden Weir at all, probably the least admirable of Wolfe's protagonists. But even Weir has the self-determination of a Wolfe hero.)