You make some interesting points about this scene. It's fitting I guess that Jeremiah solves his own problems from within. That's how our protagonists deal with their problems in these books.Zarathustra wrote:[Carefully stepping to avoid the minefield of spoilers, I can now respond to a few points here ...]
I thought Jeremiah freeing himself was perfect. I don't think the problem after the croyel is as simple as you say--merely not feeling safe and loved and needed enough to come out of his shell. The croyel was an active force that could completely take over Jeremiah's soul, if he hadn't hidden himself in his "graves." And once the croyel was killed, Jeremiah's self-imposed prison required a self-made key. He put himself there, so he had to get himself out. And he needed the right material to build the right structure, not merely safety and security. So this "mechanically building something that means nothing to us," as you say, is much more in my opinion: it is his particular gift, his talent for spatial relations--a counterpart to the temporal relations manipulated by others like Joan, Linden, Esmer, ranyhyn, etc.. He is able to work with the bare building blocks of reality, spatiality itself. And he does so with materials that find their expression in that spatiality. Like Linden, he is working with the essential Laws of this world, its basic structures, but his is unique for its focus upon spatiality.shadowbinding shoe wrote:Part 2 - chapter 9: Great Need
Stave goes out of his way to prove to us how little Linden had to do with Jeremiah's recovery. Instead it's just various people and being from the Land that he only knew a couple of days and him mechanically building something that means nothing to us that does the trick. OK, I accept that maybe Linden couldn't free him from the croyel but since then his problem was merely not feeling safe (and loved and needed) enough yet to come out of his shell. Why would a show of fireworks be a fitting answer to this need? The scenes Linden had with the Mahdoubt after Melenkurion Abatha would have been much more fitting and would be far more moving.
It's more than a symbol of the love between J and L. In fact, I'm not sure it ever was a symbol of love (like say, a ring). Go back to Runes and see what Donaldson says about the issue of racecars. Racecars weren't brought up as a subject in themselves, but rather as a side issue to the racetrack:Shadowbindingshoe wrote:And the racecar is Jeremiah birthright?? That's going too far. It only gained significance a few hours before everyone entered the Land when he picked it up for the first time. And if it became a symbol of the love between Jeremiah and Linden, throwing it to him in the midst of an action scene exemplifies what is wrong with this scene for me.
This is the most important structure Jeremiah built, because it is more uniquely his. Some have suggested it's a symbol of the Arch of Time (because it forms an arch), but I think maybe the structure is "more uniquely his" simply because it's a model for himself, a symbol of the recursive "space" of his own self-conciousness, looping back upon itself.On page 45 of Runes, SRD wrote:Now towers festooned with curlicues of track reached up on either side of his bedroom door to meet in an arch at the height of the lintel. Raceways in airy spans linked those structures to the ones which he had already finished. Yet the design would have been useless to its cars. The track through all of its loops and turns and dives formed an elaborate Mobius strip, reversing itself as it traveled so that in time a finger drawn along its route would touch every inch of its surface on both sides.
She had never asked him to take it down. Surely it was special to him? Why else had he only worked on it late at night, when he was alone? In some sense, it was more uniquely his than anything else he had built.
The car is important in its contrast to the track. SRD goes out of his way to point out--3 times--that Jeremiah has no interest in the cars. He is interested in essential structures. However, while being kidnapped, Jeremiah finally becomes interested in one car, so much that he actually takes one with him to the Land. That act of taking a car with him is a willful act, perhaps his only willful act that didn't involve "mindless" construction of spatial structures. That car was Jeremiah's birthright because it was a symbol of his freewill, his consciousness. It's his personhood, his ability to live a life within this spatial/temporal structure that is our reality. And the racetrack was "useless" to cars because of its shape, a symbol of how Jeremiah's freewill could not work properly on the recursive space of his mental prison. He was trapped in himself much like a Mobius strip curves back upon itself.
Reclaiming the car in AATE was like reclaiming his will, an act that was simultaneously "straightening out the track," by building the right shape (the bone structure) so that the space of his consciousness was no longer recursive.
About the Racecar, to me what it represented was normal childhood. Something ordinary boys play with. Are you saying this normal life and his mobius-like life until now are incompatible? I haven't thought about it like that.