Introduction and Breath

Roy C. Lackey · 18 Apr 2011, 19:26 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:26:59 -0500
Subject: (urth) Introduction and Breath
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Gerry Quinn wrote:
> For me, the term 'unreliable narator' implies that the author is telling
us
> another, different story disguised behind the overt story the narrator is
> telling is; either the narrator is lying or he doesn't understand what's
> going on.  I really don't think that either is the case with Severian.
>
> A narrator who simply makes mistakes or who doesn't know everything isn't
> unreliable in this strong sense.  Maybe we could define 'weakly
unreliable'
> and 'strongly unreliable' - but I personally feel that the expression
> 'unreliable narrator' should be reserved for the strong sense. [snip]

In general I agree with you, but Severian is a special case because of his
self-vaunted perfect memory. There are mistakes in his narrative (I once
posted a list of them), most of them minor, but it's hard sometimes to
decide which are his and which are Wolfe's. If Severian did not go on so
much about his perfect memory, most such errors could be overlooked. There
is one however that is not so easy to dismiss.

In the first chapter of SHADOW, Severian says that Vodalus handed his pistol
to the big man we later learn is named Hildegrin. Thea then took the pistol
from Hildegrin. But near the end of the first chapter of CLAW, while going
on again about his memory, he recalls that night in the necropolis and says
that Vodalus had given the pistol to his mistress. In the Appendix to
CITADEL, Wolfe wrote that Vodalus had handed the pistol to Thea.

Which of the two Vodalus handed the pistol to is not in itself really
important; Thea ended up with the pistol either way. But I find it a little
hard to believe that Wolfe made this blunder because there was otherwise no
point in having Vodalus first hand the pistol to Hildegrin, unless the
detail served Wolfe to demonstrate that Severian's memory is not quite so
reliable as he believed.

Severian was a teenaged boy at the time of the necropolis incident. What
impressed him at the time was what he perceived as something of a heroic
gesture; Vodalus declined to use his superior weapon against poorly armed
rabble. He handed off the pistol and drew his sword to perform a rearguard
action against superior numbers, thus putting his life in jeopardy. That act
of perceived gallantry is what stood out in Severian's memory of the
incident.

When he recalled the incident a couple years later, in another context in
Saltus, he still admired Vodalus for that action. When he wrote about both
occasions, ten years after Saltus, his opinion about Vodalus had changed but
he still remembered the emotional impact of that first meeting in the
necropolis. It seems to me that his emotions can and do sometimes distort
his memories. In the case of the pistol, his admiration for the gesture
seems to have colored his recall of the details of what had actually
happened. As he wrote at the end of the first chapter of CLAW, "And in any
case, the old, recalled emotions were too strong. I was trapped in
admiration for what I had once admired, as a fly in amber remains the
captive of some long-vanished pine."

-Roy

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