[big spoiler] Narrative technique in _Return_, and trilogity

Dan Schmidt · 08 Feb 2001, 14:29 · from whorl-v0012.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: Dan Schmidt <dfan at harmonixmusic.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) [big spoiler] Narrative technique in _Return_, and trilogity
Date: 08 Feb 2001 14:29:26
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0155 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0155.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> writes:

| on 2/8/01 5:21 PM, Dan Schmidt at dfan at harmonixmusic.com wrote:
|=20
| > Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net> writes:
| >
| > | Not quite.  The third-person sections are not written by the
| > | Homecoming-protagonist, but by the editors of BoTSS, Hoof, Hide
| > | and their wives, as stated in the Afterword.
| >=20
| > I thought the Afterword said that they only wrote the last couple of
| > Whorl chapters (after Horn stopped writing).
|=20
| No: the editors write: "He [the protagonist] left us no written record of
| his brief sojourns in Old Viron and the West Pole, but he spoke of them
| often.  In this volume we have re-created them to the best of our ability,
| based upon these conversations." (p. 409)

OK, we're remembering the same text, but interpreting it differently.
I took that to mean that he did write about his earlier time in the
Whorl (e.g., meeting Pig and Hound) but the editors picked it up after
he arrived in Old Viron.  Otherwise I would have expected them to
write 'the Whorl' rather than 'Old Viron and the West Pole'.

--=20
http://www.dfan.org

*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.
*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.moonmilk.com/whorl/
*To leave the list, send "unsubscribe" to whorl-request at lists.best.com
*If it's Wolfe but not Long Sun, please use the URTH list: urth at lists.best.=
com

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