(urth) Short Sun notes: Inhumi and their sources
Lee Berman
severiansola at hotmail.com
Wed Jul 10 07:23:06 PDT 2013
>Andrew Mason: I suspect that for each featured inhumu/a we are meant to be able to work
>out who their source is.
I find the blended identities found within inhumi to be very confusing. Likewise for the
merged identities within other characters like Babbie, Oreb, Pig, Kypris/Hyacynth, etc. I
appreciate and admire your fortitude in trying to map these out.
I've been lazy, and content to take a broad-based interpretation of all that. For the inhumi
I find them to be Wolfean allegory on the presence of blood-sucking parasites among us; the
liars and criminals and drug addicts who only take from society without contributing.
The conflation of inhumi with Horn's children and surrogate children seems a bit like the
Shakespearean lament: "how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child".
Since I think only Number 5 and Severian rival Horn as a Gene Wolfe literary avatar, I
suspect there is masked autobiography going on here as well as a general statement on
humanity and the difficulties of parenthood.
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