Kevin's Watch

I'd like to ask if anyone sees the similarity I do between Foul's end and those of the great dicators/evil rulers of our world.

Hitler died alone in a bunker. Mussolini was hung by his own people on a street corner. Stalin died raving in a sickbed. Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a dirty hole in the ground. Osama Bin Laden was shot in a filthy, run-down compound. All their power and money and evil amounted to nothing in the end.

Maybe SRD was trying to make this point about Foul. LF at the end of TPTP is a towering, godlike figure with a penumbra of pure evil and the full mastery of the Illearth Stone. LF at the end of WGW holds the White Gold, and with it grows powerful enough to destroy the Arch of Time itself.

...but LF at the end of TLD is cowering inside a flunky (Roger), in the end reduced to a wretch crawling on the floor when TC absorbs him.

All his great deeds, from the Desecration, to the unnatural winter, to the massive armies, to the Sunbane, all forgotten and gone.

I think I see a point here, or am I imagining too much?

Maybe you are imagining too much. No insult intended. You do make a good point. But I think that SRD's overriding goal, which actually (in my opinion) got in the way of telling a better story, was to show TC and Foul merging. That seemed to preclude anything else.

Whether SRD explicitly intended this interpretation or not, HC makes a valid point. Well done.

It's is a good point, but I take issue with what HC said about Roger - Foul certainly wasn't "cowering" when he was in possession of Roger.

yes,,..

"You Will Not!!!"

"YES, I WILL!

beauty!

My own view (extrapolating from an answer SRD gave to a question I posed in the GI) is that the outcome of the Last Chronicles wouldn't have been intended to have any contemporary political message for our world, although of course we're free to find whatever applicability we think the stories might have to our reality.

Also it's not always true that nefarious dictators in our world die inglorious deaths. Mao Zedong and General Franco of Spain both died in their 80s of the sort of natural causes that people die from at that age, and both were still in good standing in their countries when they died.

Finally - and I think this is the key point - Lord Foul isn't simply ingloriously terminated like the tyrants that HC mentions. Covenant himself makes clear that he hopes that Foul might eventually learn to see that Despite and despair aren't the ultimate truths of existence. Of course when the story ends we don't know that Foul might achieve redemption, but the question is left open.

I've done some more reflecting on the issues raised by the opening post.

Once again, let's remind ourselves that SRD almost certainly had no political purpose or allegorical intention for the Chronicles, but that we are free to find what applications seem to us to fit.

Most of the characters, peoples and beings that do harm in the Chronicles aren't simply evil or good. Esmer reminded us that nothing is evil in the beginning and that which becomes evil need not remain so.

From another angle, when beings such as the elohim or the ur-viles do harm it is because they have mistaken their weird/wurd. Likewise the Haruchai become oppressors in The Last Chronicles through a mistaken interpretation of their own Vow and its significance.

From yet another angle, the vengeful anger of the Forestals is ultimate the product of love, grief and a disappointed hope for restitution.

Even with Lord Foul himself, we learn at the end from Covenant that "All that malice and contempt is just love and hope and eagerness gone rancid."

Now if we think about some of the most important forces that have wrought harm of some kind or another in our world, we can see comparable factors at work. Think about communism, for example. It doesn't take a lot of imagine to compare the ur-viles in the First Chronicles with Stalin and his associates, and to compare the ur-viles in the later Chronicles with Mikhail Gorbachev and his supporters.

No doubt you can think of other examples and applications that suit your fancy.

It'd be interesting if the OP's idea were correct, since some people thought that the defeat of the Crimson King in The Dark Tower was "pathetic" to reflect the pathetic defeat of various evils IRL, and SRD was self-consciously striving to avoid such pathos.

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:It'd be interesting if the OP's idea were correct, since some people thought that the defeat of the Crimson King in The Dark Tower was "pathetic" to reflect the pathetic defeat of various evils IRL, and SRD was self-consciously striving to avoid such pathos.

The Crimson King's end was pathetic on a whole other level. As in, an internal consistency problem level. The guy at the end of DT7 bore little resemblance to the dude from Insomnia or any other CK appearance.