Severian's Humanity

Terence Nickolette · 07 Apr 1998, 18:31 · from urth-v0009.mbox · original

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: "Terence Nickolette" <terrynick at centuryinter.net>
Subject: (urth) Severian's Humanity
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 1998 18:31:10
Message-ID: <urth-v0009-0722 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0009/0722.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

Sorry for the error in my last post.  Let me complete my thought:

=00From a practical, perhaps male, point of view, Severian didn't need to
return to the whorehouse.  He had his trysts with Thecla in her cell.  It
was painful because he didn't like the idea of Thecla as a object.  The
memory was painful because he had come to know her person in her cell.

Severian is shockingly matter of fact about the pain he inflicts. Which
leads me to ask if there has been any discussion of the emotional, inner
journey that Severian travels in the BOTNS.  When does he find his humanity?
I would say it starts to develop when he finds and cares for Triskele.  But
then we see him strutting for the crowd when he severs heads in Saltus.  He
seems cruel and unfeeling towards Dorcus when he beds Jolenta and later
Cyriaca.

Wandering in the mountain wilderness after Typhon kills little Severian
seems to me to be a turning point for Severian. =20

Terry Nickolette

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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