1-3
Notes on Rereading Gene Wolfe's "Book Of The New Sun"
This substack is for my notes as I read The Book of The New Sun for the 5th time.
Don’t expect context, just spoilers. My aim is to note the patterns, symbols & mysteries in the text but not necessarily to explain them. Take everything with a grain of salt. Just thinkin.
Page numbers are the current Tor Essentials printings of Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel.
1: Resurrection & Death
-Claims to have nearly drowned (several times)
-Talk of symbols – i.e. pay attention reader! (p. 12)
-”....things act of themselves or not a all” (p. 12 – is this accurate, or an instance of Sev justifying himself? It seems like Narrator Severian has a LOT of help along the way.)
2: Severian
-Much talk of his perfect memory.
-1st mention of the symbols in the mausoleum – the ship, the fountain rising from water, the rose (p.15) (mentioned twice same page)
-explicit mention of two major themes, “a miraculous light … that engendered life” and that “at some not-distant time, time itself would stop.” (p. 15)
-What is the great cistern in the Bell Keep? My first thought was cooling mechanism for nuclear reactor but idk. (p. 16)
-NENUPHARS first mention? (p. 17)
-When he thinks of death, he thinks of the death of the sun (this is an early mention but maybe not the first) (p. 17) – he also thinks of the nenuphar (because he died in the river so his first death was inextricably linked in his mind to the nenuphars)
-Admits he may have actually died in the river Gyoll (he was probably unaware of this at the time.) (p. 18)
-1st mention of the megatherian who saved Sev – this includes a mention, in passing, that the surface of the moon is green; p. 19 an old man indicates that the megatherian(s) in the river are a local myth of some kind.
3: The Autarch’s Face
-p. 20 we get the very clear indication that the Matachin Tower began as a space ship.
-'near the very top is the gun room' (p.20)
-”the examination room was the propulsion chamber of the original structure.” (this is clear but buried in a parenthetical) p.20
-p.23 re his coin: “stamped on the reverse was just such a flying ship as I had seen in the arms above the door of my secret mausoleum”
-p. 27, severian at the end of the chapter tells you straight up that he is probably insane, he lies, and he himself cannot sometimes distinguish the truth from dream. “I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”