Jahlee's Death Again

James Jordan · 12 Apr 2001, 15:51 · 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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at home.com>
Subject: (whorl) Jahlee's Death Again
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2001 15:51:55
Message-ID: <whorl-v0012-0600 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0012/0600.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

	Let me try out an hypothesis on you that may explain some of the ending.
	We start out with Horn. Horn learns about the inhumi, and even comes to=20
love Krait. He sees the evil, but also the possible good of the inhumi.
	Horn becomes the Narrator, who is Horn mostly (see below). The Narrator=20
has more experiences with the inhumi, learns to care for Fava and Jahlee, e=
tc.
	But right at the end, Silk begins to awaken, it seems. Assuming he did:=20
What does Silk know about the inhumi? Nothing really. He was not with Horn,=20
and was asleep during the adventures of the Narrator. Sure, he's got Horn=20
with him still (in some sense), but the more Silky the Narrator becomes,=20
the more he seems to be reacting to the inhumi the way we would expect=20
someone without Horn's experience to react. Not only does he swiftly and=20
brutally kill Jahlee, but he's not very understanding with Jugano either.
	From the perspective of the inhumi horde, the Narrator seems to have=20
abandoned the promise that they saw in him. They don't know about this=20
personality transformation and why it is happening, but they can see that=20
the Narrator has turned against them, it seems. Thus, the attack.
	On the Narrator as mainly Horn: The Neighbors make their deal with Horn. A=20
Neighbor accompanies Horn on Green in the city. A Neighbor sends Horn into=20
Silk's wounded body. Later on, the Neighbors continue to treat the Narrator=20
as the same person they've dealt with before. I think this is a problem for=20
those who think Horn died on Green. The Neighbors, we must assume, would=20
know if that were really the case. The Neighbors assume a continuity=20
between Horn and the Narrator, which tells me that the Narrator continues=20
to be mainly Horn; i.e., that Horn is alive in Silk.
	Maybe the Narrator is Horn-Silk until the end, and then Silk-Horn afterwar=
ds.

Patera Nutria


*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