Miles, Jonas and that sailor guy

Andrew Mason · 09 Feb 2011, 23:27 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

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From: andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com (Andrew Mason)
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 23:27:49 +0000
Subject: (urth) Miles, Jonas and that sailor guy
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=9UjJ8ns9+qEVLcq0N5VvA_F1bv6YPs-H3xmsp at mail.gmail.com>

Marc Aramini wrote:

>
> 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.

No, I've always doubted it. Severian thinks Miles is Jonas because he
uses Wellerisms, and even works out a theory which would explain why
robots do so. But later we discover this way of speaking is common
among sailors, used by Maxellindis' uncle, several sailors on
Tzadkiel's ship, and even Eata in later life.

(I suppose Urth-bound sailors might have got it off interplanetary
sailors, who got it off robots. But it may just be that Miles' parents
were sailors.)

It's a puzzling question when we should trust Severian and when we
shouldn't. People seem very ready to accept his Miles-Jonas theory
,and his 'first Severian' theory - which is proved to be at least
partly wrong, in connection with Apu-Punchau. Yet his claims that
Typhon is lying, and that Merryn and the Cumaean are _not_ the two
witches he met as a boy, are generally dismissed.

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