(urth) thematic reason for 3rd person in Rttw

Mon Dec 20 08:36:05 PST 2010

All right, I was just sitting here and suddenly it struck me WHY the alternating chapters are 3rd person in RttW from an interpretive perspective.  The narrator of OBW is Silkhorn in my view, with a lot of emphasis placed on Horn's beginning quest for Silk, more than his current situation.  Well, he occasionally gets confused because of Silk's memories.  However, he says good bye at the end of OBW and Horn leaves, so the narrator of IGJ, with less flashbacks, is Silk in denial, and the narrator of RttW is Silk in increasingly less denial as he gets closer to a home that isn't his.  BUT the 3rd person chapters set back on the whorl are in 3rd person because the narrator of IGJ and current timeline RTTW SILK WAS NOT IN HIS BODY for the flashback, that is ONLY Horn, who has left the narrator.  So it is thematically in third person.  When Pig gets his eye and Silk can go back into his body at the very end, this is the climax of the third person
 sections ie - NOW we have Silkhorn, and Horn's strength gives Silk the will to live, and when he leaves, we only have Silk who was never there for the third person sections of RTTW.

Sweet.  It always bugged me why they should be in 3rd person.
Marc

--- On Mon, 12/20/10, DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:

From: DAVID STOCKHOFF <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Dionysus
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Monday, December 20, 2010, 8:13 AM

Great!

I like James's Neighborly explanation, but the pit is not explained by it. Why is a pit lying there? Carnivorous plants are a more-than-plausible answer.

And if it makes Horn a potential or partial Christ figure, then so much the better.

--- On Mon, 12/20/10, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Dionysus
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Monday, December 20, 2010, 10:58 AM

Okay, I just can't ignore commenting.

I don't think Silk is tri-partite in the way James Wynn does, I think the neighbor Horn is a separate body.  My timeline is -  Horn falls in the pit, his genetic material is reassembled and hybridized by the trees that inferentially make up the island and produce neighbor Horn.  Somehow, his spirit survives this process but he ultimately dies again, where it is sent to the soon to commit suicide or just suicided Silk (or so spiritually destroyed that he is no longer really there anymore).

Horn takes over until the very end of OBW (current timeline, not flashbacks) when he sits under a big tree, says goodbye to everybody, and then his spirit flees into Babbie now that he has jump started Silk's soul.  This is why instantly the text gets more positive - "I should have said how nice this guy was, I should have said this positive thing, oh yeah, I caught the ball, I won the game." to paraphrase.  Clearly Silk here.  And the flashbacks get weaker and weaker because Horn just left to go ride Babbie, which is where he is in the scenes on urth when he tries to protect his son and says huh huh huh, trying to get out his name and pointing to his horns or tusks or whatever it is Babbie has.  

Silk from then on is trying to deny he is Silk because he believes he has killed his friend and student Horn and needs to become him, but it is Horn who really does save Silk by getting a download of Silk's personality back into the body and then voluntarily leaving to go ride Babbie, the beast with three horns.  This is so clear to me I don't want to argue it with anyone, just throwing it out there again because I feel like the tri-partite discussion of Silkhorn is interesting but in my reading that neighbor Horn never gets inside Silk, instead it is Horn going into Silk's empty body and then re-downloading the copy of Silk into it from mainframe later.

The pit is the crux of what happens to Horn.  I think certainly his body dies there, and that the island is inferentially made of huge carnivorous trees that recombine with his genetic material to make neighbor Horn.

Most probably remember my theory that the hybridizing of corn is an important thematic clue to what is going on with the vines and trees - that the mixing of genetic matter of blood with the vines creates inhumi and the mixing of genetic matter with the trees makes neighbors.

One of the big islands on Blue is made up entirely of these enormous trees, and I always got the impression that the pit Horn fell into was the carnivorous maw of such a tree. The neighbors are now in a position to "come visit" because I think Horn has pretty much given them permission to eat people and thus hybridize with them, creating tree/human mixes.  Thus, the neighbors woul be people, too, but hybrids through this odd transubstnation (ie - significance to lines like, we are the neighbors, etc.)  Giving the world to humanity be eating all of them.  Somewhat sinister, no?

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