(urth) Spiritual and ecological succession

Son of Witz Sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org
Thu Jan 13 14:18:01 PST 2011


> 
> Andrew Mason wrote:
> 
>> Severian does tend to distinguish rather firmly between the time when
>> he was a  boy (including the opening part of SOTT) and the time when
>> he was a man, even though only a year or so seems to have passed  I do
>> sometimes wonder if another year or two went by without his noticing.
> 

On Jan 13, 2011, at 1:24 PM, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Footnote to this: Severian says towards the end that he revived
> Triskele two years before he had the Claw, though a simple reading of
> the text would suggest it was at most a year and a half. This could
> just be a slip, by either Severian or Wolfe, but another possibility
> occurs to me. Triskele's chapter is strangely self-contained. Could it
> be that it did not happen at the place where it comes in the narrative
> - between Sev's meeting with Vodalus and his visit to the library -
> but rather during an earlier winter?
> _______________________________________________
> 

Not by my reading. I think the text suggest it happens in the sequence the book presents.
In CLAW he recounts the story to Master Ash, in Foila's Request. In the context, Drotte is giving him orders, so Drotte is allready Captain of the apprentices.

“I was angry because I was the oldest, except for Drotte and Roche, and I thought the younger apprentices ought to have to do the work. I was poking at the clog with my stick when I saw him across the Old Yard. "

Severian in the first telling sees himself as a man:
"I had been a man (if I was truly a man) such a short time; I could not endure to think that I had become a man so different from the boy I had been."

In the second telling he gives that a second thought:
"I was only a boy, I suppose, though I didn’t think so then."

~witz
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