From: Michael Straight <straight@email.unc.edu>
Subject: (whorl) "And then I came in."
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 1997 08:27:43 


[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]


On Wed, 25 Jun 1997, Kevin McGuire wrote:

> On the actual early church parallels in the Long Sun books, isn't it 
> interesting that the Long Sun, as told by Horn (who is a 
> contemporary, but not central figure in the events in question), reconstructed after 
> the fact, parallels the same sort of storytelling one sees in the 
> Gospels?  

A really good parallel is with Luke/Acts (the books of Luke and Acts make
up one long "letter" by Luke chronicling the life of Jesus and the history
of the early church).  Luke starts out talking about how he interviewed
various people to get the whole story straight and, like the other
Gospels, all of Luke and most of Acts is in the third-person, but then all
the sudden in Acts 16:11, where Luke has been telling about Paul's
travels, out of nowhere it says "We set sail from Troas" (It would be
somewhere in the fourth book if you broke Luke/Acts up into four books).
Acts continues to use 'we' for a few chapters without explanation, and
then goes back to third person to finish Paul's story.

-Rostrum