For Adam and James: Literary Devices, Authorship, and

Adam Stephanides · 07 Mar 2001, 23:41 · from whorl-v0012.mbox · original

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From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) For Adam and James: Literary Devices, Authorship, and
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 23:41:08
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on 3/7/01 6:20 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes at ddanehy at siebel.com wrote:

>> I may be missing something, but I don't get your point here.
>> Is it stated that Nettle read the book while "Horn" was present?
>=20
> Ummm... when else _could_ she have read it? The _only_ time
> for her to read it (and for the children to know she has
> read it and say so) is after "the Narrator" arrives but before
> he departs -- because she departs with him. Ergo, he was in
> New Viron long enough for her to read it.

Whoops--that little fact had completely slipped my mind.  So your final
sentence here is of course correct.  I would still suggest, though, that
this time period is not necessarily as long as you claimed in your original
post ("a minimum of a month or two").  I finished RTTW in a few days, and
Nettle would have had more motivation to read OBW quickly.  As for the issue
of handwriting, if the Narrator's handwriting is the same as Horn's she
would have had a lot of practice reading it.  Even if not, Silk's
handwriting would presumably be of the same type as Horn's and hence fairly
easy for her to read.  And, given her presumed desire to find out who this
guy is who claims to be her husband and has his memories, but doesn't look
like him or talk much like him, she would probably not stop on a first
reading to decipher every difficult word, which would make things go
quicker.

--Adam

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