From: William Ansley <wansley@warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Third-person sections in RttW
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 23:59:53 

At 8:32 PM -0500 4/9/01, James Jordan wrote:
>         And I'll bring this up again, since nobody commented on in 
>when I brought it up the first time. I cannot find the place, but at 
>one point the Narrator, having been accused of being Silk for the 
>nth time, looks for a scar he expects to find on Silk's body, and 
>claims not to find it, thereby reassuring himself that he is not 
>Silk. Of course, it is pretty clear that he is in Silk's body, and 
>is partly Silk; but he himself thinks he has reasons to dismiss the 
>views of everyone around him.

I don't think you are going to get much help from this memory, which 
is inexact, if I have found the passage you are thinking of. I 
believe the passage you refer to is the one on page 188 of RttW:

----------------------------------------
... I actually pushed back my sleeve to look for the scars his beak 
had left on Silk's arm. Needless to say, they were not there--it was 
Silk, not I, who fought the white-headed one ...
----------------------------------------

This seems promising, but this scene takes place during an astral 
journey to Green, when Silk|Horn* is searching for Jahlee. I don't 
think we can base any firm conclusions about identity based on 
whether Silk|Horn's astral body has scars or not. And I don't think 
Silk|Horn rationally could either.

By the way, no matter how much anyone reading this appreciates and 
admires the BotSS, I don't think anyone will deny that the elaborate 
structure Wolfe uses in these books makes finding a specific passage 
a royal pain in the ... neck.

William Ansley

*This is my new invention. The vertical bar stands for "or" in many 
math and computer-science related notations.

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