Questions . . .

Eric Ortlund · 27 Nov 2007, 00:42 · from 2007-November.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: eortlund at briercrest.ca (Eric Ortlund)
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:42:17 -0600
Subject: (urth) Questions . . .
Message-ID: <4E82554550FE5149AD4B30A4FEA22492AF8A82 at xchange.briercrest.ca>

Dear Friends,

Forgive me again if I'm repeating old questions, but perhaps some of you
can help with the following . . .

1) What is the larger significance of the story Sev reads to Jonas about
the man fleshed from dreams?  I get that it's a re-working of the
Theseus and Minotaur story, but is it anything more than an entertaining
interlude?  Is it some kind of commentary on the surrounding narrative -
or Jonas' story?  Severian finishes the story with a dismissive comment
about it being an idle tale, but I'm suspicious something more is going
on here.

2) When Severian meets Rudesind the second time before meeting the
Autarch, is Rudesind's confusion about where they are - he keeps talking
about being back in the Citadel, and how they can check the map in
Ultan's library - intentional?  Is he hinting something to Severian?

3) Is there a deeper significance to the code phrases Vodalus gives
Severian?  There's so much about ships elsewhere in the book (the
pelagic argosy) - the ship on the tomb Sev rests in as a boy, the ship
he sails to Yesod in - and the Autarch drops the phrase to Sev. as he's
talking about the higher world Severian will eventually travel to.  Or
is it "just" a phrase?

Many thanks, 
Eric

-------------------------
Invite the next generation of students to consider Briercrest College and Seminary. Visit www.briercrest.ca/refer.  
-------------------------
This e-mail may contain confidential and privileged proprietary material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, or distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, or authorized to receive the information from the recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and delete all copies of this message.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net