{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/796",
    "note": "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.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 796,
    "subject": "Horn as antihero?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1980-01-04T10:44:25+00:00",
    "last": "1980-01-04T10:44:25+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0010-0283@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Adam Stephanides",
        "address": "adamsteph at earthlink.net"
      },
      "date": "1980-01-04T10:44:25+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Horn as antihero?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I just finished rereading OBW.  It's quite impressive, but also\npuzzling.  In particular, Horn's character remains an enigma to me,\nalthough the narrative is saturated with his personality.  In\nparticular, I want to ask about the moral dimension of this enigma.\n\nWhen I started the book, Horn seemed a decent guy trying to do the right\nthing (despite his prejudice against Sinew)--not as saintly as Silk, but\nnot nearly as twisted as Severian.  But then I got to the part where\nHorn, in essence, sells his family to Krait to get out of the pit. \nShortly afterwards, he brutally rapes Seawrack.  And later, as Rajan, he\ndigs up and revives inhumi to use against the Hannese troops, which\ncould be seen as the Blue equivalent of biological warfare.  At this\npoint I was ready to say that Horn was worse than Severian.\n\nWhen I read the book again, I realized that one could put forward\nmitigating circumstances in each case.  Horn in the pit was\npsychologically weakened by his extreme thirst and fear, and vulnerable\nto Krait's manipulations.  Besides, Krait had threatened to attack\nHorn's family if Horn didn't convince him to rescue him, so it could be\nargued that Horn was actually protecting his family (though Horn never\nmakes this argument).  Similarly, one could argue, as has been done on\nthis list, that Horn was not responsible for his rape because of\nSeawrack's song, although Horn explicitly rejects this excuse (and that\nline of argument is unlikely to win Wolfe friends among feminists).  And\nas for reviving the inhumi, Horn was fighting a war which he regarded as\njustified, and there would have been some inhumi around anyway.\n\nSo is Horn an antihero or a flawed but fundamentally decent man?  My\nsense is that Wolfe is generally sympathetic to his flawed protagonists,\nbut few if any of them have transgressed as seriously as Horn.  The\nquestion isn't made easier by my doubts as to how trustworthy Horn's\nnarrative is; at one point (the start of Ch. 12), Horn accuses himself\nof writing a \"tissue of half-truths,\" without being very specific.\n\n--Adam\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}