Chapter 3: Wood and Word
In which Galatea questions Kvothe's sanity and pays Rothfuss a rare compliment.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, a man named
I'm not gonna lie: this chapter is padding. In fact, all but one of the next four chapters are padding. Here's what you need to know: Kvothe faffs around the inn, Bast worries about him, Devan gets a knock on the head fighting off some scrael, and Kvothe is a righteous ass when Devan asks if he can document his story. The chapters aren't badly-written, exactly, but they are clearly wheel-spinning so Rothfuss can hit a certain number of pages before the actual story starts. There's not much to them, and that makes them rather hard for me to spork.
Still gonna try it, though.
Kvothe was leafing idly through a book, trying to ignore the silence of the empty inn when the door opened and Graham backed into the room.More Symbolic Silence, I see.
I have no idea who Graham is. I think he was present in the last chapter, but the townspeople are practically interchangeable, and they only get worse. Anyway, Graham shows up at the inn, carrying a big block of the same wood that Kvothe's big Chest o' Mystery™ is made of. As he hands it over, he notices that Kvothe ain't looking so good:
In fact, Kote himself seemed rather sickly. Not exactly unhealthy, but hollow. Wan. Like a plant that’s been moved into the wrong sort of soil and, lacking something vital, has begun to wilt.That's three fragments...
Alert The Editor: 8
...and four different ways of telling us exactly the same thing.
Simile Soup: 13
I'm only giving it two counts of Simile Soup because I can get behind telling us Kvothe looks sickly and then backing it up with one additional descriptor. The plant simile is long-winded but with a little editing it could be effective. We don't need to know that he's also "hollow" and "wan".
It gets worse!
Graham noted the difference. The innkeeper’s gestures weren’t as extravagant. His voice wasn’t as deep. Even his eyes weren’t as bright as they had been a month ago. Their color seemed duller. They were less sea-foam, less green-grass than they had been. Now they were like riverweed, like the bottom of a green glass bottle. And his hair had been bright before, the color of flame. Now it seemed—red. Just red-hair color, really.
Simile Soup: 18
That's one for every absolutely unnecessary and contradictory descriptor of Kvothe's eyes and hair. Sea foam and green grass aren't close to the same colour, and (depending on the grass) they're both arguably duller than riverweed and green glass. And flame is almost never actually red.
Repetition(epetition): 7
Two counts for minor repetitions within the text ("his eyes weren't as bright/their color seemed duller") and one for beating us over the head with how dull and wan and hollow and sickly Kvothe looks.
Also, wasn't Kvothe's hair "true-red" as recently as the prologue? And wasn't that just a couple of nights ago? I have no sense of time in these books.
I Have An Interrogative: 11
Finally, this is as good a time as any to introduce the count that made me want to spork The Kingkiller Chronicle in the first place:
Stu Stew: 1
There is no getting around it: Kvothe is a Gary Stu. Based on having read both extant books, I ran him through the Mary Sue Litmus Test, and the result is astounding. Even if you ignore all the answers I assumed (because I'm not Patrick Rothfuss so I don't honestly know whether he genuinely wants to be Kvothe), you still get a result of over 250 points, which is off the fucking scale. He hasn't shown his true Stu colours yet (pun intended), but as an early indicator: hair and eyes that act like mood rings are classic hallmarks of Mary Sues and Gary Stus. Yes, physical stress can affect the lustre of someone's hair and eyes, but not so much that they practically change colours completely.
Stu Stew: 2
That one's retroactive, for giving him "true-red" hair in the first place.
Kvothe pays Graham two talents for the wood, which turns out to be a mounting board for a sword named "Folly". I have a money rant building but I'm holding out for a better place to let it loose, so let's assume two talents is a fair price for Graham's work, since Kvothe already covered the cost of materials.
Graham waited a minute, but the innkeeper gave no signs of having heard. “Where would’e like me to hang it then?"Now Graham has an accent. Rothfuss handles dialect with all the subtlety of Dick Van Dyke.
Mother Tongue: 5
It's a small irritation now, but trust me: Rothfuss will more than earn his Mother Tongue points when he tries to handle a thick regional accent later on.
Graham leaves and Bast arrives to heckle Kvothe about the folly (heh) of hanging a sword for all to see on a block of near-priceless hardwood. Kvothe shrugs him off by saying he had an impulse and didn't question it, and Bast goes to fetch the sword from under his bed.
Kote paused in the act of setting the mounting board atop one of the barrels and cried out in dismay, “Careful, Bast! You’re carrying a lady there, not swinging some wench at a barn dance.”
Ladies And Gentlemen: 5
No comment.
Using both hands, Bast held it up to him, looking for a moment like a squire offering up a sword to some bright-armored knight. But there was no knight there, just an innkeeper, just a man in an apron who called himself Kote.
Is This The Real Life: 4
Quoting a lot, I know - but some of it you really have to see in context. Also: comma splice.
Alert The Editor: 9
Kvothe puts Folly on the board, and, well...like I said:
It looked as if an alchemist had distilled a dozen swords, and when the crucible had cooled this was lying in the bottom: a sword in its pure form. It was slender and graceful. It was deadly as a sharp stone beneath swift water.
Simile Soup: 19
That's for the "sharp stone beneath swift water" - I get the intent, but in execution I just struggle to see the equivalence. A sharp stone beneath swift water is deadly because it's hidden. A sword is deadly because it's fucking sharp.
Stu Stew: 3
And that's for Kvothe literally having the ur-sword. If it turns out to have been forged from starstuff or some such bullshit, I'm out.
Kvothe and Bast go back to busywork around the inn, until a miracle happens and they suddenly have customers. Don't get me wrong: like I said, this chapter is padding, so I'm glad of the change of pace. But it is rather abrupt, and after all the talk of how terrible the roads are it's quite jarring to have a group of a dozen people suddenly show up to make the place all cheerful. Kvothe mentally catalogues them as they come in: some travellers, some mercenaries or soldiers, and (of course) a tinker.
Tinker, Tailor: 2
Because of course. The point of the tinker is to give us a rather jarring POV shift so that we can follow him outside the inn and around town, where we hear a bunch of children singing a nursery rhyme about the Chandrian:
“When the hearthfire turns to blue,The verses are split by paragraphs of the tinker tinkering, but you get the point. There's also a description of a game the children play along with the rhyme, along the lines of "Ring Around the Rosy" or "Red Rover".
What to do? What to do?
Run outside. Run and hide.
“When his eyes are black as crow?
Where to go? Where to go?
Near and far. Here they are.
"See a man without a face?
Move like ghosts from place to place.
What’s their plan? What’s their plan?
Chandrian. Chandrian.”
It's all fine, but it could be better. The "secret to a real mystery/evil/quest/whatever is hidden in a children's game" is not a new trope, and I think the best I've ever seen it done is in a comedy adventure novel called Bridge of Birds. To say much more would be to give the game away, but the use of a children's game in that book is absolute bloody genius, and if Rothfuss' little rhyme doesn't quite match up I suppose it's because nothing really does.
Back to the inn, where Kvothe and Bast are enjoying all the activity - and, since we saw them enjoying all the activity just a few paragraphs ago, this section gets one of these:
NaNoPadMo: 6
I'll spare it a Repetition(epetition) because it does add new information (mostly about how Kvothe specifically feels about the crowd) - just not enough to justify the word count. Oh, and we also get this:
The women flirted.Just the women, mind you. The men are laughing, presumably in completely non-sexual ways.
Ladies And Gentlemen: 6
Drinks flow, Kvothe sings. End scene.
After karaoke night at the Waystone, one of the travellers comes up to Kvothe - sorry, Kote - and insists that he's Kvothe, to which Kvothe replies that sorry, he's just Kote, and I wonder if he and "Old Ben" Kenobi went to the same discount seminar on bargain-basement aliases. For Pete's sake, why not just call himself Pete and spare himself the trouble?
Anyway, the sandy-haired inebriate won't be discouraged:
“Kvothe the Bloodless.” The man pressed ahead with the dogged persistence of the inebriated. “You looked familiar, but I couldn’t finger it.”I am saving all my "fingering" jokes for when the lute shows up several chapters from now.
He smiled proudly and tapped a finger to his nose.Finger - finger. I see what you did there, Rothfuss.
Repetition(epetition): 8
Because I'm petty.
“Then I heard you sing, and I knew it was you. I heard you in Imre once. Cried my eyes out afterward. I never heard anything like that before or since. Broke my heart.”
Stu Stew: 4
Because of course Kvothe musics better than anyone else has ever musicked. This will be especially hilarious once we hit the parts of the book that involve actual music.
Repetition(epetition): 9
Because not even a drunk guy should need three different ways to tell us that Kvothe's singing was amazing.
“I saw the place in Imre where you killed him. By the fountain. The cobblestones are all shathered.” He frowned and concentrated on the word. “Shattered. They say no one can mend them.”This I actually quite like, both for the hint at Kvothe's legend (whom did he kill? Was it the titular king?) and for the portrayal of the sandy-haired inebriate's inebriation. Stumbling over "shattered" in an otherwise clear - if halting - conversation feels very authentic and natural.
Kvothe deflects with the old "Oh, everyone says I look like that guy!" routine, and before the inebriate can ask any more questions, Kvothe appears to fall and twist his knee. This distracts everyone from Kvothe's purported resemblance to himself (stay with me) and buys Kvothe some alone-time with Bast, as Bast helps him up to his room. As soon as they're alone, Kvothe makes it clear he was faking his injury and tells Bast that the sandy-haired inebriate recognised him. Then...
“Green shirt, sandy hair. The one nearest to me by the fireplace. Give him something to make him sleep. He’s already been drinking. No one will think twice if he happens to pass out.”HehehehehehWHAT.
Did Kvothe seriously just tell Bast to give a narcotic to a man who's been drinking? Does Kvothe even realise that that could literally kill a man whose worst crime has been to drunkenly sort-of recognise him?
I can answer that, actually: Kvothe should know. Even if you haven't read ahead to know whether Kvothe receives any kind of medical training (he does), we've seen Kvothe stitch a wound so well he has to make up excuses for it, and the brief conversation he has with Bast about which drug to use tells us he knows his narcotics. So Kvothe is calmly, willingly risking the life of a total stranger who is probably already drunk enough that another tankard of ale will effectively wipe his memory of the night anyway.
I have a theory, and my theory is this: Kvothe is a fucking sociopath.
Okay, realistically, what this is is a particularly bad case of protagonist-centered morality. It's a Gary Stu trait: the expectation that, since Kvothe is both the protagonist and the best of the best, if he makes morally questionable decisions we should go right along with them unless he tells us to question them. So sure, there'll be times when he tells us how conflicted he is over doing something awful, but those times hide all the occasions when he does equally awful things, and not we nor the author nor any of the supporting characters are expected to notice, much less call him on it.
Stu Stew: 5
Well, fuck that. Milder instances of protagonist-centered morality will get lumped under the Stu Stew count where they generally belong, but every so often Kvothe earns himself one of these:
You Fucking Sociopath: 1
For all truly heinous exemptions to the "But I iz hero!" clause of the protagonist morality contract.
Kvothe comes up with a story to explain his spuriously-wounded knee, he's very serious about Bast deflecting any and all questions about him, and I don't care because fuck that asshole.
There's another section in which Bast is worried and Kvothe has scars.
Stu Stew: 6
It adds nothing to the narrative and isn't long or interesting enough to distract me from the attempted murder, so it gets one of these:
NaNoPadMo: 7
The next morning the sandy-haired inebriate is miraculously still alive, and he and the other travellers leave. Bast cleans up and Kvothe comes down and asks him about mutton, which still does nothing to distract me from the attempted murder.
NaNoPadMo: 8
Kvothe heads off to the smithy, where he and the smith also talk about mutton.
“Did the Orrison boy stop by your place too?” Caleb nodded. “They still losing sheep?” Kote asked.Do you think it's the demon spiders?
“Actually, some of the lost ones finally turned up. Torn up awful, practically shredded.”I think it might be the demon spiders.
“Wolves?” Kote asked.Or demon spiders?
“The smith shrugged. “It’s the wrong time of year, but what else would it be? A bear?”I give up.
Apparently the Orrison farm is short-handed, because "...their oldest son took the king’s coin". This is another detail I actually really like: throughout various parts of British history, young rural men were enticed to enlist with the promise of a monetary reward, often a singular coin of great value. To accept the coin was to accept a military commission, and during harder times soldiers often had to resort to very underhanded means to get young men to accept the coin. It's actually the reason that some beer steins have glass bottoms: a soldier would surreptitiously drop a coin into a young man's cup and encourage him to drink the King's health, and if he got to the coin at the bottom then it was assumed he accepted the coin and the commission. If your stein had a glass bottom, it made it easier for your friends to spot the coin and stop you before you drained the drink. My all-time favourite folk song is about a man who accidentally enlists this way.
Anyway, I point this out because this is beautiful world-building. If you don't know about the real history of the King's coin it doesn't matter, because it makes perfect sense in context and doesn't hold up the narrative. But if you do...well, I can't read that line without hearing The Blue Cockade and thinking about all its history - all the young men dragged into wars they didn't understand and their families left wondering why they never came home from the pub. Rothfuss fucks up a lot of the world-building in this series, but in this particular instance he hits the nail right on the head, and I have to commend him.
Kvothe buys a rod of iron from the smith and also asks him for an old apron and pair of forge gloves. He says they're for pulling up a bramble bush, the smith argues that it's a bad time to be pulling up a bramble bush, Kvothe counters that it's the perfect time to be pulling up a bramble bush, and no one cares because we know he isn't really going to be pulling up a bramble bush.
Simile Soup: 20
For Kvothe spouting some shitty made-up folk wisdom about autumn being the time things are "waiting to die".
NaNoPadMo: 9
For the section being almost entirely padding.
NaNoPadMo: 10
For the chapter being almost entirely padding.
Next time, though, stuff actually happens - and Rothfuss is realistic about the human body for once! Could this possibly be a sign of improvement? Don't hold your breath.
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