Father Inire

Marc Aramini · 13 Oct 2011, 15:05 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: marcaramini at yahoo.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:05:00 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Father Inire
In-Reply-To: <9BAB169A-C833-479B-B9FB-B6989EC18DDB at liftingfaces.com>
Message-ID: <1318518300.91956.YahooMailClassic at web161805.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>

--- On Thu, 10/13/11, Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com> wrote:

> From: Ryan Dunn <ryan at liftingfaces.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Father Inire
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Thursday, October 13, 2011, 7:39 AM
> 
> 
> However, we do see that in this memoir, Severian does
> indeed play the detective. When he recognizes the badger,
> when he realizes he is in a time loop and not the first
> Severian, when he realizes the claw as the thorn from back
> when.
> 
> Just because he doesn't solve all of the riddles and
> mysteries about him doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to.
> 
> I would imagine and hope Wolfe wanted us to find things
> Severian missed or misinterpreted, since that is the fun of
> following a flawed narrator, we can have our "Ah, HA!"
> moments and pay ourselves on the back. Moments where we can
> think, "No, dummy, don't you SEE!?"

Because of his passive confidence in his memory, I'm not sure a lot of Severian's weird conclusions are correct.  He's looking his father in the face and says nothing about it, but then comes up with a theory about multiple severian's, then winds up actually going back and being the original apu-punchau and conciliator (whom Typhon DOES recognize: if you bow before me, HE will too when he comes [irony]), undercutting that Severian multiplication.  

(of course, the skull that might be his under the river gyoll DOESN'T undercut it, but that's just weird (head exploding thinking about it, and scenes like, I felt as I looked at Master Ultan that we were both drowned underwater and long dead ... what?)

This is why I never trusted his, "Oh, yeah, Miles is Jonas.  Yeah, he remembered his name was Miles" or whatever happened in that scene, when somewhere in a vision he sees a woman's face - don't know if his guess was accurate there or not.

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