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‘This Warrior of a Dead World’
Impressions of Chapter 5 of Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer
© 2019 James LaFond
FEB/20/19
Reading from pages 35-39 of Shadow & Claw
The Picture-Cleaner and Others
Severian has been dispatched on an errand to deliver a message to Ultan, the Master of Curators. On the way, in a great gallery of pictures, a man works upon an odd figure of an armored man holding a banner on a dead version of the now green moon with “blue Urth” rising in the background, “…an idealized but vitiated image.” The Picture-Cleaner describes his apprenticeship in terms of being trained on this worthless picture by his master, and now, in his old age, has returned to clean it a third time. The Picture-Cleaner is the single bright spot in this oppressive errand as two men of the lower nobility harass him over his station in life and, what is worse, he is internally troubled by his station in life, and not its perception among others but rather its odious responsibilities.
“By slow degrees, however, a feeling of disquiet seized me. I was miserable before I knew I was no longer happy, and bowed with responsibility when I did not yet fully understand I held it.”
As with Wolfe’s other first-person protagonists in Latro in the Mist, Litany of the Long Sun and the Short Sun trilogy, small scenes providing telling interaction with non-heroic characters serve to temper and illuminate the protagonist and the setting at once. Severian is rescued from his lesser nature by the Picture-Cleaner in terms that set him beyond the normal human experience:
“Like one of those half-spiritual friends who in dreams address us from the clouds, the old man said,”
And the author works another person of ordinary wisdom into the life of his extraordinarily muted hero.
Diction of note
-pinakotheken
-vitiated
Dream Flower: Five Dark Tales
‘Night Comes’
before the rising sun
‘A True Exultant’
eBook
wife—
eBook
time & cosmos
eBook
fate
eBook
the year the world took the z-pill
eBook
into leviathan’s maw
eBook
logic of steel
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
advent america
eBook
songs of aryas
eBook
the combat space
eBook
fanatic
eBook
fiction anthology one
eBook
on combat
eBook
the sunset saga complete
eBook
menthol rampage
eBook
on the overton railroad
eBook
broken dance
eBook
z-pill forever
eBook
honor among men
eBook
dark, distant futures
eBook
ranger?
eBook
cracker-boy
eBook
solo boxing
eBook
hate
eBook
under the god of things
eBook
masculine axis
eBook
by the wine dark sea
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
song of the secret gardener
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
the gods of boxing
eBook
the lesser angels of our nature
eBook
taboo you
eBook
thriving in bad places
eBook
america the brutal
eBook
blue eyed daughter of zeus
eBook
sorcerer!
eBook
let the world fend for itself
eBook
logic of force
eBook
orphan nation
eBook
when you're food
eBook
the greatest boxer
eBook
predation
eBook
within leviathan’s craw
eBook
your trojan whorse
eBook
book of nightmares
eBook
night city
eBook
son of a lesser god
eBook
the fighting edge
eBook
triumph
eBook
all-power-fighting
eBook
the first boxers
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