Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 17:31:02 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) Typhon sleeping or dead?

Blattid wrote:
>I think the question of whether Typhon is dead or in SA might be
>ambiguious ... I had certainly read him as being in SA up to this
>posting: in my reading of the passage, he appears to be hooked up
>to a device which sort of dehydrated him and kept his precious
>bodily fluids in a jar until it was time to reconstitute him,
>orange-juice-like. Perhaps I'm wrong...

I would not deny the planned ambiguity, I would not deny the reading that
says it is suspended animation, after all, and thus the time of Typhon's
revival is purely a fluke, an authorial coincidence to cause a little
picaresque action in an otherwise dull wilderness. 

OTOH, I think a strong thread in TBOTNS is about the mystery of the Claw,
and how a lot of dead/live things that seemed to be more mundane (Triskele,
Dorcas, et cetera) ultimately resolve as being supernatural and due to the
Claw.  So initially Triskele wasn't really dead (but yes, he was recently
dead); Dorcas was insane and nearly drowned (no, she was dead for decades);
Severian wounded by the avern (nope, he was killed); and so on.

=mantis=



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