Kevin's Watch

Please don't read this unless you've finished the First Chronicles.

Spoiler

Once he got his hands on the stone he lost the power of choice.

My question is, could he have chosen differently before that--reasoned, "The capacity of this thing to corrupt exceeds my capacity to resist," or "Corruption can't be fought by single combat!" or "No one questions our dedication but us, so it need not be proved this way."

Or did Bloodguard history up to then make the fall unavoidable?

Korik, being of free will before touching the piece of IS, could have chosen otherwise. But, historically, the Bloodguard never considered that their own actions could be used against them--unless you count following Kevin's orders to leave the Land just before the RoD. In which case, they didn't learn from their mistake!

I agree that upon touching the Stone they were lost.

The primary faults of the Bloodguard:

1)Underestimating the Corrupting power of the Illearth Stone under Foul's control.

2)Overestimating their Vow's ability to protect them from bad decisions---i.e., mistaking unwavering service for being infallible.

3)Effectively giving up on millenia of service when they were proven to be fallible. ["My, don't we look foolish now...I guess we'll just call it a wash and leave..." ]

Yup....good reply DW

Bannor has always been one of my favorite characters because he DID learn...and turned his back on vengeance and on directly fighting the Despiser in TPTP...

I've always both admired Bannor and hurt viscerally for him for that very reason. As Foamfollower puts it,

Two thousand years and more of pure service were violated for him--yet he chooses not to avenge them. Such choices are not easily made. They are not easily borne. Retribution--ah, my friend, retribution is the sweetest of all dark sweet dreams.

Bannor saw in Korik et al. the moral dangers of relying on physical heroism; Bannor's renunciation was morally heroic. A Tan-Haruchail orders of magnitude harder to say than the original one.

There are so many instances in TCTC when any one character could be asked whether or not he was responsible for his actions, or had the ability to choose between right and wrong, while under the influence of Lord Foul. Usually I believe that most characters can distinguish between good and evil, but usually succumb to the easier path.
The bloodguard are somehow different. They were held to a higher standard--able to resist most physical torments, natural death and so on. Knowing that the resolve of the Bloodguard was at a level unattainable by normal men, I have no doubt that Koric was totally at the mercy of LF while under the influence of the Illearth Stone. For a bloodguard to succumb completely to something that was the antihesis of the Lords he served, I can't imagine him possessing any free will.

While theoretically Korik had free will and thus could have chosen otherwise, in another way the Bloodguard Vow restrained him and brought him to the fateful choice he ultimately made. It's not just a strong belief in the Vow's power to protect the Bloodguard from Corruption in all its forms - and it's not just underestimation of the Illearth Stone's corrupting power. The Bloodguard ( and Korik foremost among them, given his status ) were fanatical in their service to the Lords, not just because of the Vow ( even though that would have been reason enough ), but all the more because when Kevin sent them away before the Ritual of Desecration, he had succeeded in casting doubts on their unwavering service ( as we gleaned from TC's and Elena's discussions in TIW ). So the Bloodguard tried to fulfill their Vow in the most demanding way, striving with their whole might of body and soul to redeem those doubts they still felt, even two thousand years after Kevin's Desecration. In this light, it is possible that Korik took the Illearth Stone simply because he was driven to do so by this same urge for perfection in service - an ironic but appropriate twist, that Kevin's Desecration, an act of despair, would pave the way for another kind of despair two millennia later, and undoubtly an act that brought Foul another advantage in that Korik's very urge to demonstrate the utter incorruptibility and unwavering service of the Bloodguard ( to redeem those old doubts they alone still felt, cast on the by Kevin's orders ) ultimately brought along the very disappearance of the Bloodguard itself after it was shown that even they could fall to Corruption.

I'm getting fed up of you Xar Stop posting such great points! Leave some answers for the intellectual retarded as well!

Heh. Great post Xar, as usual... I agree.

I'm sorry, the problem you have with me is that I both have an enormous imagination ( which I carefully cultivated through the years ) AND a love of theories... a terrible combination indeed

heh, well I love theories too... If you look at some of my older posts... you'll see that I used to be as good as you in posts... *Used* heh
I too have an enormous imagination... but sometimes am too lazy to use it...

OK, how about this: After the corruption of Korik and his companions, theoretically Bannor still had a free choice of responses. Was there any chance that he could have (by a heroic leap of humility exceeding even what he came to at the end of TPTP) refused Foul's accusation and continued the Vow?

I keep trying to imagine it, but always end up thinking that accepting the Lords' judgment ("yes, we still want your service") in preference to his own judgment (total disgrace--I see this as being tons heavier than simple foolishness/embarrassment) would have been too far outside Haruchai patterns of conscience.

And the sixteenth-century feudal Japanese solution to mortal disgrace--suicide--certainly wouldn't have been an available option...no Haruchai would allow himself so easy an escape from the consequences of failure.

The Bloodguard were bound to each other, metaphorically speaking, by the fact they all shared the same Vow; this alone was a reason for them - particularly due to their fanaticism - to ALL feel guilty of Korik's failure. But most of all - Bannor was one of those who first took the Vow, and as such, he was among the oldest Bloodguard. Not only was he among those Kevin sent away ( and thus, was among the first Bloodguard to feel that doubt had been cast on their service - and one of the Bloodguard who bore this feeling for the longest time ); he was a Haruchai who had sacrificed all he had had - including his wife, two thousand years earlier - to give his whole life and dedication to the Lords. He and the original Bloodguard had undoubtly shared the unshaking belief that the Vow would preserve them from all Corruption could throw at them to sway them; but Kevin's actions cracked this unwavering belief, inlaying with doubts. When at last Bannor saw that the Vow had never had the power to preserve them, he probably came to see his whole service as a half-lie - at least insofar as their purity of service was concerned: the Vow didn't preserve them, and so they couldn't truly claim pure service, because Corruption could have swayed them if he had wanted to. The realization of having spent two thousand years of your life ( after having abandoned your wife and your old life ) believing in something that was never true might drive many people mad.

The Haruchai, being tougher and hardier than most people, didn't go mad: they simply realized they no longer could perpetuate this false belief, and went home.

Wow, Fist would love this conversation!!! Excellent posts everyone

The Haruchai in general, and the Bloodguard in particular, never did anything half-way. They were very absolutist in their beliefs and actions. Extreme.

And you know what they say about absolutists---either you are an absolutist, or you aren't.

DW

Very good thread!

Xar and DukkhaWaynhim are making some very good points in relation to the Bloodguard.

I saw that you are online Fist, so I thought I'd stick this topic under your nose.

DukkhaWaynhim wrote:And you know what they say about absolutists---either you are an absolutist, or you aren't.

Anyway, the only choice they made was to touch the Stone fragment. Hyrim tried to warn them not to, but the Haruchai are a naive people in many ways. Maybe they didn't think it could do anything without Foul being present. Or maybe they thought they were stronger than the Giants, and could resist anyway. (After all, until then, the Haruchai, as far as we know, had never been mastered by any force. Thay had no reason to think they were in any danger.) Whatever made them decide to risk it, they were lost. The insidious suggestion to take the fight to Foul was put in their heads. They weren't exactly mastered at that point, they were just doing what, according to Bannor in The Spoiled Plains, the Bloodguard had always wanted to do - take the fight to Foul. As always, Foul gets people to do what he wants by making them do what they really want. And when Foul had them in front of him, mastering them was a simple matter.

As Mhoram says to Quaan in TPTP,

This demand for absolute answers is dangerous. Kevin, too, required either victory or destruction.

This is part of the nature of the Haruchai however, so whether or not your inherent way of doing things or not makes you culpable, I don't know.

Just a thought, perhaps the Haruchai had been mastered before - by the Vow itself. While they were an absokutist people anyway, perhaps the dictates of the Vow, especially one so supernaturally sealed, took away what little ability to choose they had left. What do you think?

Sum sui generis
Vs

Actually, I don't believe the Vow took away their freedom of choice. After all, vows in this world don't take away ours. If I chose to break faith with my spouse (a condition extremely contrary to fact), having previously vowed fidelity would not prevent me from being able to do so. The whole point of any vow is that it is a self-chosen oblation of free will--a choice made in advance and adhered to through all changes and chances. It's a specific use made of one's freedom, not a forfeiture of freedom, and as such it could be taken back at any moment. But isn't. Being forsworn is experienced by most people of conscience as losing permanently some part of one's being. (The loss is remediable if one can ask the forgiveness of the vow's recipient--an option so far outside Bannor's world view as to be hardly even a theoretical option.)

The supernatural consequences of The Vow raised the stakes on it, but didn't change the basic moral structure of the acts of vowing and vow-keeping. For the Haruchai in their innocence, extravagance, and absolutism, the self-loss entailed in being forsworn was increased past all endurance--and the threshold of what qualified as forswornness simultaneously lowered. A reader can just watch them being slowly devoured by it, from Kevin to the Power of Command to the conflict of interest in Korik's mission to the final discontinuity. And all of those but the last--and arguably even that--would not have parsed as being forsworn by any reasonable standard of self-judgment.

Beings of reason they weren't. In that is their magnificence and their tragedy.

True, but I think the combination of their nature and the Vow made them unable to break it, it had to be broken for them. The Vow only exacerbated their inherent absolutism, rendering them unable to choose in certain situations.

I say this because the Haruchai in the second chronicles seemed to learn from the example of the merewives and the compulsion of the Clave, but the Bloodguard didn't learn from the Ritual of Desecration. The only difference between the two was the Vow. It left the Bloodguard unable to choose NOT to take the Illearth fragment, when the Haruchai could have made that choice.

Sum sui generis
Vs

Come to think of it, in White Gold Wielder we see Haruchai able to take different directions of choice than the all-or-nothing dichotomy of "pure, flawless service forever or else no service at all." In the first series, the combination of the Vow and the doubts to the Vow brought on by Kevin made the Illearth Stone inertial, as you observe. Korik could not have been who he was and not made this ultimate attempt to prove himself. I don't think it's so much that the Bloodguard didn't learn from the Desecration, as that they learned too much of something hazardous. They became determined to prevent it from ever happening again, and to expiate their survivor guilt. That survivor guilt gave Foul something to exploit.

In the forehall of Revelstone, Durris starts to offer a new Vow (to prove "we can do it right this time", to make up for all his ancestors--has he still not learned how dangerous proving oneself is?) and Covenant asks him for a completely different kind of service, one that has nothing to do with expiation. "Here you can serve something that won't fail you." And Cail acknowledges that his destiny is different even from this (he actually has achieved an individual sense of identity--perhaps a first among these telepathic aboriginals) and requests permission to depart for the Sea.