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Re: "Sebastian" (as in Knight) (fwd)
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From: Wayne Daniels <wdaniels@nypl.north-york.on.ca>
Greetings all,
>To put it briefly, the name "Sebastian", being deliberately
>laborious (Russians of his time and milieu were not named "Sevastian"),
>suggests an epigrammatic device: "Sebastian [Knight]" reshuffles its
>letters into "[a Knight] Is Absent", i.e. the half-brother is an elaborate
>fiction the pursuit of which is the mode of the plot's propulsion. If one
>"sees uner Real", one understands that the the elusive hero of the
>narration is indeed absent, while the narrator is he.
This is ingenious, certainly. But perhaps it is worth remembering the a
knight's move combines both the direct and the oblique, which suggests (to
this
reader, anyway), that the frustration of the narrator's pursuit is implied by
the character of the "piece" he is after. In other words, a knight is a
Knight.
Or something like that.
Cheers,
Wayne Daniels