irony

in my immediately previous post I said something about the tone of the statement that the dust could "scarcely" be the same dust. I mean that there is some ambiguity in that formulation - like when Severian says, at the beginning of Sword of the Lictor, Gee, just think, if the conciliator were here, he would be in constume just like anyone else! How neat! That statement takes on an ironic cast when he know he will re-enact the life of the conciliator (or that he probably is the conciliator, I suppose) Let's face it, Wolfe's narrator's make a living off not seeing the obvious. For example, 1000 pages later, "You mean I'm not Horn?" Marc Aramini