_The Knight_ by Gene Wolfe and his wonderful narrative technique

JavaJosh · 30 Oct 2005, 09:59 · from rec.arts.sf.written.2005.mbox

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: "JavaJosh" <javajosh at gmail.com>
Subject: _The Knight_ by Gene Wolfe and his wonderful narrative technique
Date: 30 Oct 2005 01:59:24 -0800
Message-ID: <1130666364.020773.189690 at z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written

A marvelous book. In tone, style and character this was very similiar
to _The Book of the Long Sun_. It is a story about a boy transported to
a magical world, where he himself is transformed into a physically
powerful man. As is Wolfe's wont, the story is told as if it were
penned much later by the protagonist himself. That technique is what
I'd like to talk about.

I very much like this style for it's dispassion. This narrative effect
contrasts nicely with the action itself, which is often passionate. It
encourages a distance which maximizes the reader's observational
instincts, rather than immersive instincts.

In a sense, Wolfe's books are more intriguing for their voice than for
their subject matter. In a first-person narrative the reader is much
more entwined with the protagonist than with other schemes. After all,
every word you read is of the protagonist. Therefore even when you read
'there was a chair' you know not only that there was a chair, but that
the protagonist did not find anything much to say about it, and that
for some reason it was worth noting that the chair was there. These
small effects add up into a very complete character.

The downside to this technique is that the reader becomes very
sensitive to mistakes. When inconsistent language is used, or the
description becomes a bit too...authorly, it's hard not to see Gene
Wolfe himself bleed through his protagonist. Luckily these mistakes are
few and far between, perhaps more so in "The Knight" than in the
previous Wolfe books that I've read.

A second and equally important characteristic of Wolfe's narrative is
the implicit importance of language, and intentional speaking. Wolfe's
narrators are often correcting themselves, carefully qualifying their
statements, and generally being very deliberate with their speech. I
strive to speak intentionally as well, and insofar as Wolfe shows how
it could be done, he is writing a positive role-model. I very much
appreciate that.

There is more I'd like to write about the story of _The Knight_ but
that will have to wait for another post. In the meantime, I hope that
anyone reading this goes out and reads _The Knight_ because it is as
enjoyable as it is thought-provoking, has a good role model for a
protagonist, and most importantly it's a lot of fun!

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