Kevin's Watch

When we reach the end will it have a familiar ring?

Covenant defeats Lord Foul for the final time, the Land is saved forever and he and Linden prepare to spend the rest of their lives together in Andelain.
Then Covenant and Linden settle down for bed among the boughs of a large Gilden. In a single room Woodhelven made tree cottage.
Covenant falls asleep.
Then he awakes suddenly. He rolls over and nudges the still form next to him, complaining that he'd had a terrible nightmare. He sits up and turns on the bed lamp revealing his bedroom at haven farm. Joan sits up and asks what the dream was about. Covenant brushes the question aside but says that he wants to come along with Joan when she takes their infant son Roger to see his family. The new book can wait. Family is more important.
Somewhere the Creator smiles.
Lesson learned.
End.

ala Who shot J.R., Newhart, It's a Wonderful Life, The Family Man etc.

Just a thought.

Frankly S.R.D. is the last author on earth that would do something like this. THANKFULLY.

it will be instead Lord Foul waking up from dreaming he was Covenant. And yes, Linden will be in bed next to him......somewhere the Creator smiles

Esmer wrote:it will be instead Lord Foul waking up from dreaming he was Covenant. And yes, Linden will be in bed next to him......somewhere the Creator smiles

Hahaha...

-jay

SRD has all but promised in his interviews that the ending wont be that predictable, nor will there be some horrible ending like TC = Foul or the Creator etc.

I will re-watch the interviews soon to try and find his exact quote.

mini696 wrote:SRD has all but promised in his interviews that the ending wont be that predictable, nor will there be some horrible ending like TC = Foul or the Creator etc.

...Hmm. Read the Gradual Interview topic...

CovenantJr wrote:

mini696 wrote:SRD has all but promised in his interviews that the ending wont be that predictable, nor will there be some horrible ending like TC = Foul or the Creator etc.

...Hmm. Read the Gradual Interview topic...

Which particular part? 75 pages? Not light reading.


This is the quote I was looking for.

"I am not going to play some authorial trick on you where TC at the end of the story, turns out to be both the Creator and the Despiser himself. That doesn't mean he isn't, it just means I'm not going to play some authorial trick on you. It would be difficult to argue that TC is the despiser."

(Apparently) SRD wrote:
"I am not going to play some authorial trick on you where TC at the end of the story, turns out to be both the Creator and the Despiser himself. That doesn't mean he isn't, it just means I'm not going to play some authorial trick on you. It would be difficult to argue that TC is the despiser."

Though this does indeed sound like classic Donaldson, a link would be nice. You said you watched these? We wouldn't be lucky enough to find something like that on Youtube, would we? A quick search for "Stephen R Donaldson" revealed nothing.

Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that it's actually him. This is exactly the kind of "answer" he'd give--one that requires a bit of consideration, and doesn't say exactly what one might assume. For instance, if he actually wants to eliminate the possibility that TC = LF or Creator, why would he go to the trouble of adding that middle part? He is deliberately, explicitly making the distinction between revealingthat TC = LF or Creator via some authorial trick, and the possibility of TC = LF or Creator. TC could be LF (or rather, LF could be a part of TC) in a way that didn't involve some authorial trick.

What would some "authorial trick" be? We certainly can't infer that this trick is the linkage of these characters, as you seem to imply. In fact, the only thing we can know for certain is that an "authorial trick" can't include this linkage, because he went to the trouble of explicitly distinguishing the two. However, I believe your argument depends on just that interpretation: i.e. that Donaldson has confirmed the fact that TC does not = LF or Creator, when in fact all he has done is reveal a fact about how he would go about treating such a linkage (if one exists--which I believe it does, see below).

An authorial trick would be having Covenant wake up in the real world after a dream and look in the mirror and see two "fang eyes" in a cloud of smoke. Or, having Foul escape to the real world and become (or look just like) Covenant. In other words, any event where they literally meld together into one person, or are directly perceived as being the same person in the real world. That's a cheap trick.

This doesn't, however, eliminate the interpretation that Lord Foul is a symbol for Covenant's (and perhaps everyone's) own self-hatred. That is not an authorial trick. It's not a gimmick. That's simply the story he was trying to tell. But it would violate the rules of this story, and the symbolic integrity, for this metaphorical boundary to be crossed in the other direction such that characters from the Land are literally real in Covenant's "real" world.

In the essay, Epic Fantasy in the Modern World, p 7, SRD wrote: . . . In realistic fiction, the characters are expressions of their world, whereas in fantasy the world is an expressions of the characters. . . .The characters confer reality on their surroundings.

This is obviously true in "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant." The villain of the piece, Lord Foul, is a personified evil whose importance hinges explicitly on the fact that he is a part of Thomas Covenant. On some level, Covenant despises himself for his leprosy - so in the fantasy he meets that Despite from the outside; he meets Lord Foul and wrestles with him as an external enemy.

www.stephenrdonaldson.com/EpicFantasy.pdf

mini696 wrote:

CovenantJr wrote:

mini696 wrote:SRD has all but promised in his interviews that the ending wont be that predictable, nor will there be some horrible ending like TC = Foul or the Creator etc.

...Hmm. Read the Gradual Interview topic...

Which particular part? 75 pages? Not light reading.

Sorry, I thought it was on the last page of the Gradual Interview topic, but now I remember someone linked to it from a post elsewhere recently - and I now can't find that post. It contained a quote from the Gradual Interview that said (and I'm repeating this as accurately as I can from memory), "In the First Chronicles, Covenant defeats Foul. In the Second Chronicles, Covenant surrenders to Foul. In the Last Chronicles, Covenant becomes Foul."

Exactly what this means is, of course, up for debate. Donaldson wouldn't have said that if it was really that simple. Nonetheless, he said in no uncertain terms that, in some way, Covenant is, or will become, Lord Foul.

The Ending:

Roger is actually an autistic child staring into a snow globe with a castle inside of it. The whole thing was a construct of his imagination.

The End.

Or, at the very end, Bob Newhart will wake up Suzanne Pleshette and tell her about his weird dream.

Hmm... I think the ending of the Last Chronicles will be like the final episode of The Prisoner.

I hope with all my heart that the ending isn't centered around some form of dream sequence. Thats so... Easy.

Malik23 wrote:

(Apparently) SRD wrote:
"I am not going to play some authorial trick on you where TC at the end of the story, turns out to be both the Creator and the Despiser himself. That doesn't mean he isn't, it just means I'm not going to play some authorial trick on you. It would be difficult to argue that TC is the despiser."

Though this does indeed sound like classic Donaldson, a link would be nice. You said you watched these?

It was from the "VIDEO INTERVIEW: June 24, 2007 (Elohimfest)"

Go to the end of the page and download the final Question (Question 7 - Covenant/Foul parallels?). www.stephenrdonaldson.com/fromtheauthor ... hp?Page=26

Cail wrote:Or, at the very end, Bob Newhart will wake up Suzanne Pleshette and tell her about his weird dream.

If so, she'd better say "Bob" so we can all have a drink

mini696 wrote:

Malik23 wrote:

(Apparently) SRD wrote:
"I am not going to play some authorial trick on you where TC at the end of the story, turns out to be both the Creator and the Despiser himself. That doesn't mean he isn't, it just means I'm not going to play some authorial trick on you. It would be difficult to argue that TC is the despiser."

Though this does indeed sound like classic Donaldson, a link would be nice. You said you watched these?

It was from the "VIDEO INTERVIEW: June 24, 2007 (Elohimfest)"

Go to the end of the page and download the final Question (Question 7 - Covenant/Foul parallels?). www.stephenrdonaldson.com/fromtheauthor ... hp?Page=26

Cool, thanks! (Not sure how I missed that.)

Since it's been done recently, in a series I will not mention in case someone still has not read it, he could have the last line be:

"She came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict."

The End

Now, how he gets to that point is anybody's guess, but he's a smart guy, I'm sure he can figure it out.

Zenlunatic wrote:Since it's been done recently, in a series I will not mention in case someone still has not read it, he could have the last line be:

"She came out of the store just in time to see her young son playing on the sidewalk directly in the path of the gray, gaunt man who strode down the center of the walk like a mechanical derelict."

The End

Now, how he gets to that point is anybody's guess, but he's a smart guy, I'm sure he can figure it out.

I haven't read all of that series, and I don't plan to since someone told me the ending. He was furious, and I can understand why.