Severian's family tree

don doggett · 24 Aug 2006, 06:19 · from 2006-August.txt.gz

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From: kingwukong at yahoo.com (don doggett)
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2006 23:19:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Severian's family tree
In-Reply-To: <000e01c6c73d$7309ea80$a23ec6d8 at rclackey.stic.net>
Message-ID: <20060824061956.86487.qmail at web32405.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

--- "Roy C. Lackey" <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:

> 
> Severian, interrupting his narrative to directly
> address the reader at the
> time he was writing, wrote:
> 
> "Ymar is dead, and such memories of his as lived for
> a time in the blood of
> his successors are long faded.
>     "So mine in time shall fade too." (SHADOW,
> chapter XVII)

This assumes that Severian is a reliable narrator, but
there have been serious signs that his identity is
severely (no pun intended) compromised. I don't
believe he knows which memories are his or whose they
are either. And this is not grasping on my part; the
easiest way for an author (Wolfe) to hide things is to
have the narrator say things that he thinks are true
but aren't and then belie them with what the reader
observes. This happens constantly in SS and LS and I
think it happens often in NS as well. IMO (flawed as
it may well be) direct statements of belief by any of
Wolfe's protagonists are completely unreliable.
Besides, if Sev is like any of Wolfe's other multiple
personality characters, there are certainly more than
just Thecla and Appian in his head. But, I'm not
saying that Sev's memories of his "childhoods in the
citadel" are shared with Ymar, just that that's a more
likely scenario than he and Thecla sharing such a
memory. I actually think that your interpretation is
the correct one, "childhoods" describing three
separate places.

argumentatively yours

Don

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