(urth) PF as YA

"Fernando Q. Gouvêa" fqgouvea at colby.edu
Thu Apr 16 11:05:14 PDT 2009


Hmm, I thought it was obvious that PF (and, before it, The Wizard 
Knight) were intended as books for young adults! Both books are about 
manliness and what it implies, about honor and courage, about danger and 
our reaction to it. Those are long-standing themes of young adult 
fiction, though I'll admit that these days they are minor chords amidst 
a slew of plucky heroines and folks who overcome their disadvantages 
and/or oppressions. In both PF and WK the main characters are young, 
come from "our world" or something close to it (which makes them easier 
to understand and identify with), and have to deal with a completely 
different reality. How they deal with it is what makes the books 
interesting.

Is Chris intended as a sympathetic character? I think that to some 
extent he is, though Wolfe has never really written a character that was 
a "good guy" in every way; he knows that all of us have flaws. One of 
the things Wolfe was trying to do in PF, I think, is to complicate our 
sense of what is right and what is wrong by having a young man be formed 
in an utterly foreign culture (piracy in the 17th century). Things we 
consider horrible are routine for him. Things we consider routine (see 
his comments about his life as a priest) are horrible to him. I know 
it's easy to just say Chris is a "bad guy", but most of us haven't been 
shot at and had to fight for our lives. Could we? If we could, should 
we? Nor have we been hungry and had to decide whether to steal.

This is why, I think, the time travel motif is essential to the book. It 
allows the kind of distancing that is required to embed us (via Chris) 
in a different cultural world.

Of course, all this is going on while Wolfe is also taking a look at 
pirate adventure stories and rubbing our noses in the parts that don't 
usually get much attention: the easy brutality, the way women and slaves 
were treated, and all that. But he does it through Chris's eyes, who 
sees much of it as "just the way things are"...

Fernando

Jonathan Goodwin wrote:
> For those of you who suggested that Pirate Freedom was a YA novel,
> does your definition of that genre include an element of didacticism?
> If so, what lessons would you a young person take away from the book?
> Though this is a disputable claim, I find it plausible that younger
> readers are more apt to identify uncritically with the protagonists of
> books they read. Another generalization is that writers of YA fiction
> try to create sympathetic (and perhaps even instructive) protagonists
> for these identity-seeking young readers. I find it difficult to
> believe that Wolfe intends Christopher to be such a character. At the
> same time, however, was there any doubt in your minds that Christopher
> as American priest is intended to be sympathetic in his current
> actions and beliefs?
>
> In an interview with Peter Wright published in Shadows of the New Sun
> (Liverpool UP: 2007, p. 143, viewable via google books), Wolfe says in
> an interview that There Are Doors came closest in execution to his
> original conception as any of his work. I wonder how PF would measure
> on that scale. (He also mentions on that page his bafflement at the
> unexplained/unexplainable strong reactions that readers have to his
> work.)
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-- 
=============================================================
Fernando Q. Gouvea             
Carter Professor of Mathematics   
Colby College                     Editor, MAA FOCUS
5836 Mayflower Hill               Editor, MAA Reviews
Waterville, ME 04901              http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/
http://www.colby.edu/~fqgouvea

A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away. 
  -- Dr. Boyce, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), stardate unknown





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