(urth) Severian's Phraseology...

Jeff Wilson jwilson at io.com
Fri Dec 3 23:08:57 PST 2010


On 12/4/2010 12:04 AM, Ryan Dunn wrote:
> No, he speaks with the collective voice before he is Autarch, after consuming Thecla, to my knowledge. No?

The analeptic makes it more actual rather than notional to be multiple 
people, though there is an identifiable point where she begins to be 
less of a separate person and more integrated.

> I think the peculiarity is how objective Severian the Narrator is about his own condition. He is writing all of this as Autarch, with all the memories in his brain. He is able to sort them and explain their differences within his mind this way, yet in conversation he almost explicitly speaks in what I guess you would call first-person plural.

The books are written after he's had ten years to fully integrate the 
minds...but there are still a couple of places in the ms where he begins 
writing things from Thecla's POV without a formal transition, like when 
they recall childhood and mentions her father's cavalry.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >



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