Father Inire

Lee Berman · 13 Oct 2011, 15:12 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:12:54 -0400
Subject: (urth) Father Inire
Message-ID: <SNT123-W22103858E62CD83E3EEFB4CFE00 at phx.gbl>

>Ryan Dunn: But Lee, as with the moon man painting, Severian the Autarch may not 
>even know what it was. Same goes for his encounters with people he should recognize.
>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!?"Of course it is Wolfe who holds the cards and smirks while we have those 
>moments, even if we sometimes think we do. Severian certainly does not. That is the genius 
>of Wolfe's writing.
>...ryan

Ryan, I think we are basically in agreement. I don't think we can always tells where 
Severian's unreliability is due to him being deliberately deceptive or just that he
is a bit dense.

Still, Severian mentions a few times in the text what a big liar he is and that used
to confuse me since he seems quite honest in his dealings with the other characters in the 
story. I've come to conclude that his admission of guilt is because the biggest recipient 
of his lies are his readers. Severian finds this regrettable but necessary and I still think 
his primary motivation for lying to or misleading us is to avoid openly airing his family's 
dirty laundry.

What I find fascinating is what this might say about Gene Wolfe and how he views his own
life, his writing and his readers.

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