Urth Net
Jonas in the Antechamber
↰ answers Robert Borski
· by quotation
mantis asks:
2 quoted lines
... the
central mystery seems to me to be: what is so upsetting to Jonas? It seems to be something(s) that the prisoners told him, rather than just an upwelling of empathy for their terrible situation.
My take on this, ever since first reading New Sun, is that a major part of Jonas' distress is the realization of how much time has passed on Urth since his departure. He tells the fairly straightforward story of the Fortunate Cloud's return, remarking that the spaceport wasn't where they expected it to be (bad info, continental drift, or what?). Then on hearing Severian's tale of the Magician and his son, he realizes that the story of Theseus has mutated almost beyond recognition (his remark about the black sails). Then he discovers that the prisoners may be the descendants of people from his ship or another like it which crashed generations before (the Kim Lee Soong stuff). All three of these shocks have in common the apprehension of long spans of time.
Finally, of course, he fears that he may be imprisoned for a long time, and will never see Jolenta again.
So, we have a span of tens of thousands of years back to the loss of knowledge about the spaceport; a span of thousands of years in which the culture of his age was lost or changed; a span of hundreds of years in which the prisoners have lost the common culture of humanity; and a span of decades of possible imprisonment in which Jonas will lose Jolenta.
Last there is the span of seconds in the room of mirrors in which he regains the stars (or does he?).
Dave Lebling
(aka vizcacha)