(urth) Borrowed Man writeup

[Marc Aramini]

Well, gonna have to add this realization in there somewhere. Sometimes when
I glance through these things afterwards a particular image clicks into
place. When ern first sees Arabella at the owenbright library, she
complains that he brought her chocolates that “greased the skid to Hell”.
Chick Bantz, the androgynous thug in blue, then comes and offers ern three
hundred creds, hot chocolate, and three sandwiches, trying to get him to
leave with him. When ern gives the third sandwich away, he sees Arabella
staring into space and unconsciously grasping a pencil. Ern told chick he
had a card for a different library that would not unlock the owenbright
doors, though they would let him out of Spice Grove. Ern will meet three
Arabellas and will just leave one with Colette, whom he finds staring off
into space just as Arabella was in this scene. I don’t know why sandwiches
should serve as symbolic stand in for the Arabellas but they seem to. The
library card he mentions as a means of egress, but not for every door,
might also be related to the method he leaves the jungle planet door the
first time: a key he already has which only works to exit the right side of
the door. Chick’s short stature and blue clothes might link him to the
deceased mother, but perhaps this set piece actually metonymically
illustrates who was responsible for buying the Arabella “sandwiches.” We
should remember cob (a swan - chick offers ern a swig of swan-n-sweetheart
here) is a bird as his car Canary - chick, too might be in line with this.
The Arabella clones may have been financed by Cob, with his murder on mars
(mom) forgery. Whether chick IS a form of the mom or of Cob, this scene
illustrates who put things in motion through the connection of bird (and
food) imagery - cob-swan-canary-chick.

That's a key scene because it is also where Ern makes his Chatterton
mistake, the young forger who poisoned himself, thinking that instead the
boy choked on a biscuit. Tied to the presence of Chick ...

On Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 12:27 PM Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is my writeup on A borrowed man - two to go (land across, evil
> guest).
>
> https://pastebin.com/3Ph363VX
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