Introduction and Breath

James Wynn · 18 Apr 2011, 19:18 · from 2011-April.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:18:40 -0500
Subject: (urth) Introduction and Breath
In-Reply-To: <241282.71042.qm at web84101.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References: <241282.71042.qm at web84101.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4DAC8E90.6030908 at gmail.com>

Additionally,

e)  Almost all of what he sees and hears that he considers important and 
also his interpretation on that. However, 1) some things he describes 
that he considers incidental are more important than he realizes,  2) 
some things he sees as significant he interprets wrongly. In both, cases 
the author presents enough information (or believes he has) that the 
reader can properly interpret them.

f)  All of the above, but neither the narrator nor the reader has enough 
information to interpret the data. This is done to add a sense of depth 
to the plot such as when the dwarves sing of Nargothrond in "The 
Hobbit".  But, when Wolfe does it, he is far more ornery such as when 
Severian first meets Apu Punchau.

J

On 4/18/2011 12:52 PM, DAVID STOCKHOFF wrote:
> Basically, the narrator may tell us
>
> (a) everything  he sees, hears, knows, and thinks (as above)
> (b) only what he sees and hears but not what he thinks
> (c) only some of what he sees and hears (i.e., he withholds)
> (d) some dramatic combination, e.g., where he tells us everything but the identity of the killer, which he knew from page 1.

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