(urth) Green is Urth Redux

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Tue, 1/11/11, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:



 
He's not fat!


I mean....not if he's a reliable narrator...uh oh.  Now I'm thinking of a shirtless Vegas Elvis.  Thanks.  Thanks a LOT.
I see it clearly now, an accurate way for film to capture his unreliability.  A sluggish fat Sev recounting his tale with voiceovers, his narration completely mismatched with the action revealed through flashback.  Claiming to touch Dorcas' breast?  Gets slapped.  claiming to heal people inexplicably with his claw?  Just a shiny marble.  Denying anything about little sev?  Uh oh.
 
Okay, he's not that unreliable.  I think the only useful way to approach Wolfe is in determining WHY the characters might be unreliable about some things and not others.
 
In 5hoc, that guy is trying to blend in, so of course he is hiding his mimicry.  In Peace, Weer can't face the evil he has done, nor can he face his own death, so he turns away from it every time he is about to confront it, in permanent denial of his situation.  Silk can't assert that Horn has left him because he still has fragments of his memory and is not willing to accept Horn might have died for him.  Latro has the best excuse, he has the memory of a fruitcake.  Otherwise in Short Sun the people don't really know where they are or what is going on, they don't understand their environment.
 
 
Severian does seem to want to set himself up as an unwilling messiah, but I find his motivation a bit harder to determine what areas are particularly unreliable than the above examples.  Why would he lie about anything? He is autarch.  But he does make a torturer seem sympathetic and wiping out humanity look like a positive thing and I think this says loads for Gene's writing talent, but I don't know what it says about what we can and can't trust from Sev.
 
Long Sun has an identical problem.  Horn wants to push Silk as a hero, but I can't figure why he might want to falsely hints that Silk is Pas' heir if it isn't valid, and those visions seem to reveal an awful lot.  Wolfe likes to put those devils in the details but I can't think of how to logically explain those details in Long Sun, supposedly from the pen of an offscreen character, and this is why I prefer Wolfe's first person, where individual motives can definitely directly influence the information presented and can be singled out by a reader as evasion or deliberate elision.  Strange facts in Evil Guest have no narrational explanation, except that reality itself has become inconsistent.
 


      
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