Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v007.n014

From: Alice Turner <al at interport.net>
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 21:19:13 +0000

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

>
>I think the narrator is a dog, specifically a domestic dog who has
>fallen out of (or ejected from) the car his humans are riding in. The
>fall gave him amnesia, favored plot device of writers.  How can you tell
>he's a dog?  He has the marks on his neck of a leash or collar; a
>"birthmark" that goes "from one side of the hair on the back of my neck
>to the other."  He only comes up the shoulders of the Wiggikki, who are
>wolves (few dogs are as large as a wolf).  When he finally meets the
>proprietors of the Great Sleigh, they are angels.  What dog owner is not
>an angel to his dog?
>
>Of course, I'm not saying the narrator _is_ a dog literally, but in the
>same sense that the Wiggikki are wolves, and so forth.  The robots obey
>him because he is "human," not literally, but of all the human-like
>animals they encounter, he is the most human; more human than Mantru,
>who is a-human or ex-human, mostly likely a homunculus (in the TBotNS
>sense). The narrator does exactly what you would expect a loyal dog to
>do: find his masters again; though, being a dog, he's distractable on
>the way. He eats the artificial food because it's what a dog raised on
>kibble would be used to (the moral dimension aside).

On second thought, viz, you have to deal with all that "True Man" stuff in
the underground kingdom. Hard to fit that in with your theory. What do you
think?

-alga-