On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Jag wrote: > On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 19:47, Philip Hart wrote: > > ... 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. Vlad isn't mumbling - his grammar is correct and he rotates from thread a->b->c->a mid-sentence without mistakes, although the experiences described in each thread are hard to follow individually (he's not describing sharpening a knife while talking to Kragar while getting a foot-rub from Cawti). This just doesn't seem like a verbal performance. Anyway, the Vlad books are not pure dramatic monologues - just look at the chapter titles. Incidentally I like the Vlad-as-God-to-be hypothesis (not that I believe it). It has a lot of echoes with Severian's apotheosis in the New Sun/New Urth books - Vlad is already in some sense a tripartite being containing Vlad, Loiosh, and Teldra. He'd be the god of unified Dragaera - part Easterner, part local fauna, part Serioli, part Dragaeran; part witch, part sorcerer, part Eldersorcerer; an old soul and a new one.