(urth) Short Story 11: Trip, Trap

[Darth Ed]

On Apr 1, 2012, at 2:19 PM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> Everyone in the story perceives events as if they are at the center of the conflict of importance – and this is even true of the secondary non-narrative parts.  The Protector who sends Garth the native narrator to get tribute must get that tribute from ANOTHER man who styles himself “The Protector” – everyone thinks they are more important than they are, and their perception of events are clearly tainted by this.  It is this self-aggrandizing or self-obsessed agenda that creates two very different narrative strains (four if you count the self-narrative of the Traki/troll and the final letter of Dr. Beatty, which ends – “I had to write my article for Arch. Worlds (the one that stirred up all this symposium rubbish) on the very sketchy information in your letter. How sketchy it was you will note in the clipping I am having transmitted with this.  I gave you full credit as you see.  It is the paragraph beginning : ‘I sent an investigator…’”
> 
> Note that this ending posits the universal nature of the tendency to self-aggrandize: I, I, I from Dr. Beatty.  Even while claiming to give him full credit, he sets himself up as the primary cause and the responsible party, and this pattern of egoism is really why the accounts differ so much, even more than the “technological/primitive” dichotomy.  

This is some fantastic commentary on one of my favorite Wolfe stories.

I think my reading of the ending was slightly different than yours. Finch claimed he lost consciousness, but, when Garth came out of his trance, Finch was covered in blood, holding his sword, which was also covered in blood, and the traki was dead. Their respective stories that Garth killed the traki in the "spirit world" seems rather dubious given the blood on the sword, in spite of the claim that the traki had no visible wounds. I thought it was more likely that Finch killed the traki with the sword and then blamed it on Garth in his communique to Beatty, perhaps because it would be bad form for an academic such as Finch to kill one of his subjects. Garth of course took credit for killing the traki in his communique to his Protector by saying he did it in the "spirit world." Perhaps they even colluded in this aspect, but I think it's just as likely that they came up with their respective stories independently.

Later,
Ed

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