Silk's so-called suicide

Robert Borski · 12 Feb 2001, 21:37 · 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: "Robert Borski" <rborski at charter.net>
Subject: (whorl) Silk's so-called suicide
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 21:37:26
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0198 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0198.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Woo-hoo! I finally found the passage I was looking for in IGJ.

What seems to have thrown many of us off in RTTW is that only Horn/Silk's
arm injuries are mentioned when the farmer's wife attempts to clean him up,
whereas this is how Horn describes the situation upon waking up after
transfusion into Silk:

"[I] found myself upon my knees besides the open coffin of a middle-aged
woman. My hands and arms and face and neck were all bleeding, and an old,
worn knife covered with blood was by my hand. There was no one else in the
poor little house in which I knelt, and almost nothing in it that was not
torn or broken." (p. 127)

To Adam Stephanides and vizcacha: are you now still going to argue that Silk
has suffered a failure of nerve and cut himself not only on the arms, but
his hands, his face and his neck too? Good grief; if so, it has to be one of
the strangest suicide attempts in fiction. And how also do you account for
the torn and broken nature of the manse's appurtenances? That Silk, while he
was cutting himself all over, decided to trash the place?

It occurs to me that a bomb might have caused both the injuries to Silk and
the devastation to the manse--we know, after all, that someone has tried to
assassinate Cald=C3=A9 Mint--but this does nothing to explain the blood-cov=
ered
knife Horn finds near his hand, as if dropped at the moment he shuffles off
his mortal coil.

In other words I still aint buying the suicide theory, and even if you don't
buy my Pig-as-assassin alternative, I think you have to admit your argument
is strained.

Robert Borski

*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