Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 09:11:56 -0600
Subject: Re: (urth) DOORS: Green's intelligence
From: Adam Stephanides 

on 1/21/03 11:18 AM, Michael Andre-Driussi at mantis@siriusfiction.com
wrote:

> Adam Stephanides wrote:
>> I have to admit, when I last read TAD (several years ago, at least) it never
>> struck me that Green was lacking in intelligence (or courage, or
>> enterprise).  And rereading the confrontation scene with Lara (chap. 31),
>> Green seems no less intelligent than Wolfe's other protagonists.
>> 
>> Actually, now that I think about it, Wolfe's main male characters in his
>> novels written after TBOTNS all seem to me to be more or less the same
>> person, except for Horn in OBW (and possibly Latro in the Soldier books, my
>> memory of which is sketchy).
> 
> Respectfully I disagree.
[snip]

I'm not quite sure what you're disagreeing with.  But if it was the
assertion in my final paragraph, I probably expressed myself more strongly
than I'd meant to.  I didn't intend to say that the protagonists were
identical in all, or even most, respects.  What I meant was that they all
seem to me to be the same basic personality type: what I think of as
"idealized middle American male" (even when they're not American).  They're
not intellectuals, but they know how things work, and how to do things,
without boasting about it.  They have a tendency to despondency, but are
otherwise psychologically "normal" (unlike, say, the various protagonists of
5HC).  And they're fundamentally decent, without being priggish.

--Adam


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