miles, jonas, and that sailor guy, and sea/interplanetary vessels

Gerry Quinn · 09 Feb 2011, 15:44 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 15:44:41 -0000
Subject: (urth) miles, jonas, and that sailor guy,
	and sea/interplanetary vessels
References: <475329.67457.qm at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <C2D1228726584723BBD93DA2C78187AE@jill>

From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>
> You know, I've never been really sold on the idea that the soldier Miles 
> or whatever is really a returned Jonas, and yesterday for the first time 
> in a long time I was reading the ending of Citadel (what wonderful 
> imagery) and the description of the masculine voice and the feminine 
> voices under the water by the sailor who used Jonas' Wellerisms kind of 
> made me wonder once again if there is a universal consensus that Severian 
> is right in believing that soldier guy is Jonas.  This unnamed (I think) 
> sailor has all of the speech style of Jonas, but we always attribute it to 
> them both being sailors.  In the afterword, Wolfe says one of the most 
> frustrating things is Sev's failure to distinguish between sailing vessels 
> and actual interplanetary vessels, and says the moon is no farther than 
> another coast.  Where could this apply in the text?
>
> The sailer says for a bit he felt as if he was wasn't on Gyoll, but on a 
> river that runs up in the sky, or underground, and then he runs into that 
> weird ship of Pandours or something, and I always wanted explication for 
> this scene in general, and why Wolfe says in the afterward that Severian 
> does not distinguish between sea and interplanetary vessels.

Severian does seem to leap to the conclusion that Miles is Jonas on the 
basis of rather slim evidence, although apart from the speech mannerisms, he 
has apparently seen visions of Jolenta.  And Severian seems to raise people 
he has been associated with.

But if he's *not* Jonas, it's hard to see what the point of him is, so I 
tend to assume Severian is probably right!

I don;t know about the ezplanation for the ship, but as regards the matter 
of distinguishing ships I think Wolfe is just setting the scene for a 
double-take by the reader when he realises that 2the old sailor" was 
probably an astronaut, and "ship" is as likely to mean "spaceship" as 
"seaship" in Severian's time.  [Similarly with the "ship volant" on 
Severian's coat of arms, which the reader will initially picture as a 
sailing ship - but of course this kind of ship is truly volant!]

- Gerry Quinn

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