Thea and Thecla

Lee Berman · 10 Jan 2011, 13:01 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:01:37 -0500
Subject: (urth) Thea and Thecla
Message-ID: <SNT123-W2368A8EFDFEFEE5F0A82DCF0E0 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: Jordan, you made an excellent point about the narrator trying to keep 
>his narrative straight from Severian's point of view....This needed clarity of narrative may 
>be another reason why Wolfe makes Severian's memory so strong....However, enough mystery must 
>remain about some of them..that he can still recall and almost convincingly relate his original naive 
>experience.

I think this is a very good analysis. And it is not only relevant to SF and brain-eating characters.
We all have childhood and youthful memories and we all know what it is like to have a doubled
perception; how we thought and felt then vs. how we think and feel now.

I'll note that Mantis once posted a nice summary of how BotNS paralleled Gene Wolfe's life. As he 
wrote this book, he himself was facing the story-telling problems Severian was facing. We have all told
stories of our youth so we all know (if we are good story-tellers) that it would ruin the story to 
constantly, repeatedly interupt the story events with "well, of course now I know that...". 

We are not all good story tellers but we are all experienced story readers/listeners. A good author 
acknowledges and uses that fact.

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