At 05:34 PM 6/7/2002 -0500, Rachael Lininger wrote: >On Jun 7, Chris Turkel said: > > >One of the first things you learn in lit class in college is that > >sometimes you have to decide if the narrator is trustworthy or not. I > >really like Vlad but I don't entirely trust him sometimes, I know there > >are things he's not saying, glossing over or outright lying about. > >Teckla is one of those books where you have decide how truthful he > >really is being. > >There are (at least) two kinds of unreliable narration: the ones where >the narrator isn't seeing important things, and ones where the narrator >is deliberately lying. > >Vlad is both dense and dishonest. So's Paarfi, in very different >ways. > > >> It might be, of course, that the author does view the > >> Cycle as a simple and unalterable physical reality, as > >> Vlad almost describes it in _Taltos_ (though even Vlad > >> says that a sufficiently strong person could move the > >> Cycle -- and that raises the question: what kind of > >> strength, and how much of it?). I sort of doubt it, > >> though. > >God like strength, probably. The Cycle does seem simplistic, at least on > >one level but then again, sometimes that's the way it is is the best > >answer of all. >Consider who he was, though: _even_ _if_ that were the case for >Dragaera, Vlad might be able to do that sort of thing. Cawti, too-- *if* she'd start to think about the problem as something other than simply political and economic. Consider that there's at least strong circumstantial evidence that Devera is a god. Devera has only one known divine ancestor, her grandmother. Now, who else do we know who's the granddaughter of a being of that order (keeping in mind that the difference between gods and demons is one of degree, not kind)? Mike