Patera Pike's Ghost

Jim Jordan · 25 Jan 1997, 10:42 · from whorl-v0002.mbox · original

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From: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Patera Pike's Ghost
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 1997 10:42:09
Message-ID: <whorl-v0002-0074 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

>[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

>	How do you suppose Horn sees things? Is he intentionally
>misleading the reader by having Silk come to the wrong conclusions time
>and again?
>
>=3DDoug Eigsti=3D

	I don't think so. The question has been raised whether Severian is a
trustworthy narrator. If we cannot trust Severian, then the whole story
falls apart, since there is no way to check on it. Thus, the story is
Severian's story, period, warts and all. In conversation Wolfe rejected the
notion that Severian is duplicitous.
	Wolfe's game is to give you all the facts, so you can figure it out. If we
cannot trust the narration, the game is no good. The suggestion of a
duplicitous narrator destroys everything Wolfe is trying to do.
	And I think the same applies here. If Horn is misleading us, there is
really no way we can know it. But there really is no reason to think he is.
We are to assume that Horn spend hours, perhaps days, talking with Silk,
and that he is accurately reporting what Silk told him. Wolfe as a
conservative Catholic assumes that Matthew and Mark are telling the truth
about Jesus, and the reader of the Long Sun Quartet should assume Horn is
telling the truth about Silk and the other characters.
	The other way Horn knows stuff is by interviewing the people who made the
exodus with him, who happen to be many people who chatted with Silk and
could tell him a lot about Silk. It would be interesting to test this
hypothesis by taking a list of the people with Horn, and then seeing how
much of the Quartet could have been reported by those people. For instance,
all the passages about Chenille and Auk are thereby accounted for.=20

JBJordan


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