From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (urth) Awaken Gods of Ushas
Date: Fri, 30 May 97 19:53:00 GMT


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other works]

Reply:  Item #2671081 from URTH@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET01#

cephalothorax,

Needlesstosay, I'm quite pleased that you are enjoying the Lexicon.
You asked about Sev Sleeper waking up the others.  Yes, it is an
inspired guess on my part.  In the last chapter Sev asks his priest
to take him to Odillo, and finds them "sleeping" just as he himself
was presumed to be "sleeping."  This harkens back to the last chapter
of CITADEL where Severian writes: "I have disturbed my own tomb, and
now I go to lie in it"; but it also acts as a new threshold, a
(semi-?) cliffhanger--we know that Severian has finally realized his
godling status and stature; we wonder what he will do next to fulfill
the prophesy of the Green Man's society, in the same way that we
wondered at the end of TBOTNS how Severian, clearly on the threshold
of demi-god status at that time, would manage to bring the New Sun.

While I haven't tried to even sketch out the Greening of Ushas, I
sense that his first step is to revive the others.  After all, this
is the same sort of thing he was always trying to do in TBOTNS, so it
is "within character" to the point of almost mundane predictability.

=mantis=