Severians Later Appearance (Spoilers)

brunians at brunians.org · 12 Jan 2010, 19:20 · from 2010-January.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: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:20:13 -0500 (EST)
Subject: (urth) Severians Later Appearance (Spoilers)
In-Reply-To: <44fb53d11001121112p33db7f25ge5fb2c045b3ab4e0 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <COL121-W50DA345DDA3146D220FB4BE66C0 at phx.gbl>
	<907652.74759.qm at web50707.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
	<COL121-W21C82D8C3C08B5E41FE5DBE66C0 at phx.gbl>
	<44fb53d11001121112p33db7f25ge5fb2c045b3ab4e0 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1895.67.142.130.46.1263324013.squirrel at brunians.org>

Unreliable, certainly, but dishonest? I don't think he is particularly
dishonest. When does he actually lie?

.


> Severian's a generally dishonest and unreliable narrator, but he does
> tell SilkHorn that he won't ever tell of their meeting. As Sev
> probably doesn't completely understand how much SilkHorn influenced
> him, he feels no need to break the "promise" he made in his casual
> statement. In New Sun, Sev acknowledges that he has broken many
> promises, but that doesn't mean that he likes breaking them. I could
> see him taking some satisfaction in not writing about SilkHorn.
>
> And surely Severian encounters all kinds of fascinating things that he
> doesn't tell us about. His life as autarch was doubtless fascinating,
> but we don''t hear too many details about things he did as ruler, his
> courtship of his wife, etc. Other things Severian just doesn't feel
> like writing about, i.e. most of the executions and excruciations he's
> paid to perform.
>
> But yes, one does wish Sev had mentioned SilkHorn. Or that Wolfe had
> translated a manuscript with curious gaps and missing pages.
>
> -Matt
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

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