From: "Robert Borski" <rborski@coredcs.com>
Subject: (urth) Gene/Jeannine/#5
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 1998 03:42:41 


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

Tony Ellis wrote about Fifth Head's narrator:

"Very astute of you  to have spotted this. (Either that, or very 
stupid of me to have missed it.) I suppose if Wolfe is a typical
American-Irish name then it's reinforced slightly by the photograph
of his mother Number Five sees, where he declares her to be of Celtic
origin."

"All the same, I think I would say "can be theorised to be" rather
than "can be determined to be"... We can't be sure his name isn't
Witherspoon. :-) And where are you getting Gene from? The
Gene-geneticist pun is the sort of thing Wolfe loves, of course..."

Tony, et al:

On pg. 22 of the Scribner's edition of FIFTH HEAD, Number Five's aunt tells
him, "Call me Aunt Jeannine." And since later we learn that Aunt Jeannine
is a female variant of Number Five's father (and since Number Five himself
is cloned from the same source), inferentially we may assume Number Five's
name to be the male equivalent of Jeannine or Jean/Gene.

As for the "Wolfe" moiety, besides the library reference, Number Five
remarks that his house is sometimes referred to as Maison du Chien and that
this "may have been a reference to our surname as well." [ibid. pg 14].
Chien meaning dog in French, it's not that big of a stretch to assume
Wolf/e (dogs being evolutionarily the domesticated versions of wolves) is
the name in question.

Robert Borski

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/