There's a long post brewing somewhere :: found the ending quite logical and uplifting, until reading everything here !
But this isn't that post.
The (sub-optimal) title of this post refers to a couple of weird clues found in the text, single words used by the narrator which broke the world building.
I discussed this with my wife, who is a lot more literary than me, and she assured me that any skilled writer would have done this on purpose. It wasn't a mistake and it wasn't an editorial oversight.
Pfff, after all that build-up these two examples seem a bit pathetic - heregoes anyway
1) on my 3rd re-read of TJE or WLW (the part where the skin eaters are in the old non-man mansion) the narrator describes the dimensions as (from memory) “the length of a football field”. A huge jump out of Earwa's world into our own.
2) again, a measurement thing, I think from an even earlier book, the narrator describes a distance in “Miles” or “Kilometres” - not Earwan measurements.
These two (surely intentional) breaks in the narrative consciousness subtly suggested the possibility of the nuke scene. That there were contemporary eyes looking into & shaping Earwa.
Has anyone else found any other “sticky out bits” like these ? I'll be looking out for them on the 4th re-read.
This also raises the question as to why it was fine for the narrator to use present day,
our world concepts to describe Earwan phenomena, yet couldn't call a nuke a nuke, or a hologram a hologram.
...
Slightly unrelated, but involving a stick (or was it a bone...
). Right at the end of TTT on the way to meeting Big Moe, Kellhus steps on a twig or something. It cracks. That was just so un-Kellhus.
I've seen a few posts about the meaning of this, but no conclusions.
It was interesting that in almost exactly the same point of the second series (20 pages before the end) there was another “Twig”; ground seemingly unconditioned by Kellhus, though this time much more explicitly significant to the unfolding of events : Kelmomas.
Are there any conclusions to be drawn from this, or is it simply random structural echoes ?
Show Posts
