Too-Lupine NarratorsWhorl

Folks have complained that Horn's children wouldn't write that way, that it is implausible that they would write a narrative that deliberately hides the protagonist's identity until the "gotcha" moment at the very end where they write, "Silk nodded." I think this is a misunderstanding. I think Horn's kids faced the same problem that drives us to write about "Hornsilk" or "Silkhorn," that they believed that this man was somehow both Silk and Horn and that rather than use some awkward amalgam name like Passilk, they just didn't call him anything until the point in the story where he had changed and it then seemed appropriate just to call him Silk. In other words, they didn't wait to call him Silk in order to keep the reader in suspense, they waited to call him Silk until he actually was Silk. Wolfe, of course, is doing both. -Rostrum *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.