Urth Net

← back to the conversation

RTTW spoilers, the Silken tongue

Michael Andre-Driussi · 16 Feb 2001, 10:24 · 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: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at sirius.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) RTTW spoilers, the Silken tongue
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 10:24:38
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0251 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0251.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Kevin quoted and wrote:
>>The narrator must know that he isn't "Silk" (whether this is "oldSilk" or
>>"mainframeSilk" or "litSilk," or some combination thereof, doesn't matter
>>at the moment) but he must have some inkling that the Silk-he-is-not exis=
ts
>>somewhere else (mainframe, for example, the place where the dead folk go).
>
>Yes. Mucor told him so.
>
>>I think that the narrator knows he is in Silk's body,
>
>I think he doesn't, not for a very long time. The conversation between Pig
>and the shopkeeper underscores that. (Assuming it's a reliable
>reconstruction, and that Pig and the shopkeeper understand the protagonist,
>which of course they don't....)
>
>Do you have any evidence to indicate that, at the time he lectures to
>Olivine, "the narrator" had decided/realized/admitted to himself that he
>was in Silk's body?

None, alas!  Mostly the result of impressions over the previous two books,
impressions which seemed confirmed by a first reading of RTTW.  I'll try to
take notes on the next reading!

=3Dmantis=3D

Sirius Fiction
Catalog and errata sheet at http://www.sirius.com/~mantis/



*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