[Dragaera] narrative time in FHYA and The Hobbit

[Jerry Friedman]

--- On Sat, 11/29/08, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote:

> From: Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu>
> Subject: [Dragaera] narrative time in FHYA and The Hobbit
> To: dragaera at dragaera.info
> Date: Saturday, November 29, 2008, 6:43 PM
> At the beginning of _FHYA_ we follow a messenger in the
> palace.
> Paarfi gets a bit diverted and when he gets back to the
> messenger
> she has proceeded along her route.  This reflects the
> onrush
> of events in the novel, as pointed out in the intro to the
> Text.
> 
> I happened to notice something similar in The Hobbit: in
> chapter 7,
> Flies and Spiders, the Mirkwood spiders have captured the
> dwarves; one spider is about to kill Bombur.  Bilbo picks up
> a stone to throw at the spider.  Tolkien remarks that Bilbo
> has good aim, and can in fact do lots of things that "I
> haven't had time to tell you about.  There is no time
> now."  And in chapter 18 he writes, "[Bilbo] was
> aching in his bones for the homeward journey.  That,
> however, was a little delayed,
> so in the meantime I will tell something of events." 
> He goes on to catch us up on stuff that happened recently.

So the similarity is not the order of events and point of
view, but the conceit that the narrator is limited by the
time in which the events take place?
 
> This is not something that one would expect to find in a
> Vlad narrative
> I think.  I don't know quite what the difference is -
> maybe that he
> is relating things as he experienced them instead of
> describing what happened.

I think so.  Everything in the novels he narrates is in
his point of view (even if the order is scrambled).  In
/Orca/, he and Kiera spend a lot of time filling in
what the other has missed, but there's no opportunity
for the kind of thing you're talking about.  The closest
thing may be in /Athyra/, where the bits in Rocza's
point of view seem to fill in between the main narration
in Savn's.

Jerry Friedman