On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 19:47, Philip Hart wrote: > On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Steven Brust wrote: > > > At 05:33 PM 3/5/2003 -0500, Gaertk at aol.com wrote: > > > > > >So what was the reason behind the stream-of-3-consciousnesses > > >bit in _Issola_? > > > > If you don't know, then they didn't work. > > Couldn't it (they, whatever) have worked without his consciously knowing? > > I thought the point was to evoke an experience which was fragmentary or > rather fragmented Vlad and was put together afterwards in that way since > our language isn't adapted to such experiences. If that's what was > intended, it worked for me as writing, but I thought at the time that > the passage showed authorial (?) intervention. Vlad is a sophisticated > storyteller (see _Taltos_ or _Dragon_ for similarly interwoven books) but > one with a verbal bent - and I can't see anyone speaking the lines from > that passage even having had the experience in question. I'm AFB at the moment, but from what I remember of the lines, I can see someone saying them as part of telling their own story. It'd be the kind of thing where its a really powerful memory and the storyteller gets lost in the memory while recalling it and starts mumbling out phrases about what they remember. In some ways it'd be like someone who just experienced a very traumatic event, where they just mumble fragmented pieces of what happened.