ending and other stuff WK

StoneOx17 at aol.com · 06 Jan 2005, 03:56 · from 2005-January.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: StoneOx17 at aol.com (StoneOx17 at aol.com)
Date: Thu Jan  6 03:56:54 2005
Subject: (urth) ending and other stuff WK
Message-ID: <20.3bb0ba5b.2f0e817e at aol.com>

In a message dated 1/6/2005 12:39:07 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
aramini1 at cox.net writes:

> I only have about 36 more messages to read before I'm caught up, so forgive 
> me if someone has said this.

> It seemed pretty clear to me at the end of the Wizard Knight that Able is 
> going back to the missing years of his childhood with Desiri, the part 
between 
> leaving the log cabin and showing up on the island where he planted the 
spiny 
> orange. (The years when he would have grown up to be the man he was 
> acelerated into)  

> The Wizard EXPLICITLY states that Able watches himself plant the spiny 
> orange during his time in Skai, and Michael also explicitly states Able was 
> the only person on the island when the knight appears - this means that 
> Able has, in some fashion, been freed from the passage of time.

Watching himself plant the spiny orange was one of those things he did during
his missing 20 years in Skai.  Here we are (it's really difficult to find 
things in 
this book, although not as difficult as in Peace).  Page 56.

"We went to the spring Mimir,"  I said at last.  "I drank its water and 
remembered 
you and Gylf, and a lot of other things.  I visited myself, watching myself 
drink
water in the ruins of Bluestone Castle.  Afterward the Valfather laid his 
condition
on me. ..."

Presumably, respecting time is part of the condition the Valfather has laid 
on him.
Although, even when he broke the condition, he still wasn't able to go back 
in time 
and save those people who had died, so even time travel has its limitations 
in 
Mythgarthr.

> Able is going back to his childhood at the end, the lost time that was 
taken from 
> him.  

But he remembers his missing years after delivering his message to Arnthor, 
so 
they're not lost to him in the end.  Page 404.

   I shook my head.  "We played together as children, Uri.  Disiri and me.  I 
remember now."
   Her voice was tender. "Do you, Lord?"  
   "I do."  Until that moment I had not known I remembered.  "I thought they 
wiped those memories away, but they only hid them under the message. ..."

> The great lord whose service will be required is Arnthnor, and Able will go 
> on to forget everything that happened.  The book is a big circle.  But it 
isn't the 
> first Wolfe book to work like that.

I don't see any evidence for this, and I don't like the idea at all.  WK 
seems to me
to be a coming-of-age book, where Able learns stuff and grows up.  You don't 
make
big circles out of coming-of-age books -- it defeats their whole purpose.  
(OK, in
some sense, Fifth Head of Cerberus is an exception to this.  But my point 
still
stands.)  

The idea (that somebody proposed here) that Able's going back to America to 
serve the Most High God -- and I sure hope the great lord in need of a knight 
is 
the Most High God and not the American President -- I find much more 
convincing.  

-- Stone Ox (Peter)

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