pale face

Roy commented that the pale face under water in chapter 6 might have been seawrack. Wasn't he already with Seawrack by then? Is that a flashback? He should know that she plumbs the depths in her swim - I don't know. Seawrack seems to be such an odd answer to an event that disturbs the narrator a great deal. He reacts strongly to the face and thinks it might be driftwood, providing a weird rationale when he already has an excuse in the form of Seawrack. Why would she scare him so much? Let's not argue about misrepresentations: when I said immediately, I mean in a three or four page span unseparated by any spaces or whorls in the text, a "section" that is included as one unit, in this case a section of only three pages in the SFBC edition. That would seem to be immediately following. I apologize if my semantics were obscure in any way. Any comments about the stuff I said about the "scarcely" business in IGJ and how the narrator can't believe that a creator would make two related species in two different places? Wasn't that important to the context: if you can posit a direct relationship between the vanished people and normal people, then the narrator is in effect saying they would not have sprung up in two different places, when one would do. This is the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted on p 349, I believe. Right? Marc Aramini

Date: Sunday, March 31, 2002 4:15 PM

deal. He reacts strongly to the face and thinks it might be driftwood, providing a weird rationale when he already has an excuse in the form of Seawrack. Why would she scare him so much?<< No, Horn was not with Seawrack then, and it's Chapter 5, not 6. (OBW, 139) The next day he and Babbie encounter the bat-fish, then meet Seawrack when they get back to the boat.

how the narrator can't believe that a creator would make two related species in two different places? Wasn't that important to the context: if you can posit a direct relationship between the vanished people and normal people, then the narrator is in effect saying they would not have sprung up in two different places, when one would do. This is the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted on p 349, I believe. Right?<< Sure, "scarcely" could in some contexts be intended as ironic, but I don't think that was intended in this case. Hide had, in effect, just posited a direct relationship between humans and the Neighbors: "Aren't they people like us, only four arms and four legs?" "I doubt very much that they looked exactly as we do, Hide. No doubt the Outsider made them from the dust of this whorl, just as he formed us from the dust of the Short Sun Whorl [ . . . ] Besides, the dust of that whorl can scarcely be identical to the dust of this one." Silkhorn was correcting Hide; he was making a fundamental distinction between humans and the Neighbors that was more than cosmetic. At least, that's how I read it. -Roy