# the play *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 30 Jun 2008* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Marc Aramini *30 Jun 2008, 05:41* well, it all depends on how much effort Wolfe put into the play. I don't find the idea that it could tell us something particular about particular characters absurd at all, but I suppose I will grant that the aggregate of relevance is a valid point. How minute does Wolfe want to make his extra-textual references? Some works require external context, such as a precursory understanding of the basic features of the saints or religious referents, and other works do not. This is all tied up with authorial construction and intent. If a tree falls in a Wolfe book and nobody notices, is the narrator really dead? ---