Sev as anti-hero

On 4-4-99 Alex David Groce wrote: <snip>

it's clear that there IS moral growth in Severian throughout the BOTNS. The final talk with Palaemon, in my opinion, establishes that for the pre-Urth Severian, at least.<< Oh, I agree he makes moral progress. I said much the same thing in an off-list e-mail to someone here. But I still do not like Sev and have trouble seeing him as Everyman--even a dark Everyman. Silk, Weer, and the other figures you mention are much more sympathetic figures, whatever their flaws, because they come closer to Everyman than Sev. They do not wield the powers, temporal or supernatural, that Sev does. They do not have his capacity for doing harm. mantis used the term "anti-hero" and I have to agree with it. I could never identify with Sev, as I could with Weer or Green or Silk or Free's boarders. Roy

I won't argue that Severian is easy to identify with; as to Silk, I would place him in another category of Wolfe's protagonists. Green is somewhere in the middle--not as dark as Severian (or even Weer), but not an almost saintly (and likable--which is hard to portray) fellow like Silk. I'm just not sure anti-hero is the right term for Severian. It seems to me that in the end he stumbles to glory, at any rate, and that's not just an accident--the Hierodules choose him because he does, in the end, get the job done. Of course, this depends on your interpretation of the last pages of Urth.

Considering the trail of dead bodies Weer leaves behind him, I'm not sure that I want to identify with Weer. Wolfe's protagonists are not admirable or likable people, for the most part (the "Free" quartet being a very pleasant exception). Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney at crossover.com Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html

Well, some of us aren't convinced that Weer is reponsible for anyone's death other than (A) the boy on the stairs, and that's not exactly murder and (B) maybe (there is someting sinister about it at any rate) the frozen-freezer guy. I think the "Weer as mass murder" hypothesis is most likely nonsense.