Chapter 5: Notes
In which Galatea gets specific about surgical tools and wonders why we're still nowhere near the start of the actual story.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe saved Devan from a horde of attacking scrael, but did not save the chapter from being needlessly contrived.
It was well past midnight by the time Kote made it back to Newarre with Chronicler’s limp body slung across his lacerated shoulders. The town’s houses and shops were dark and silent, but the Waystone Inn was full of light.*raises hand* I have questions.
I Have An Interrogative: 15
We cannot possibly have been that far from Newarre in the last chapter. Even allowing that Kvothe "closed the inn early" after buying the gloves and apron from the smith, we're explicitly told it's "after evening came". So Kvothe has time to suit up in his apron and cloak, make it all the way to the abandoned house, build a giant bonfire, meet Devan, fight the scrael, stitch up Devan's worst wounds, bury the scrael, and walk all the way back to Newarre while injured and carrying Devan, all by sometime after midnight.
So why the hell couldn't Devan just make it to Newarre?
Even if the town was too far away to see during the day, he should have seen the lights as soon as it got dark - which, it being autumn, would have been early enough that the townspeople would have lit lanterns and such to keep on with their evenings rather than just going to bed. Scrael aside, Devan knows the roads are bad: he got robbed just a couple of chapters ago. It makes no sense that he wouldn't head for the lights of the nearest town rather than splitting off for what could easily be the campfire of the same kind of highwaymen who already robbed him.
The answer, of course, is contrivance and padding. And, while I won't give it another NaNoPadMo count, I will point out that this kind of inconsistency is a good way to spot padding and contrivance after the fact.
Bast is not happy.
Bast stood in the doorway, practically dancing with irritation. When he spotted the approaching figure he rushed down the street, waving a piece of paper angrily. “A note? You sneak out and leave me a note?” He hissed angrily. “What am I, some dockside whore?”
Ladies And Gentlemen: 7
Oh, give me a break.
Kvothe hands Devan over to Bast, but Bast is still angry about the note.
“It wasn’t even a good note. ‘If you are reading this I am probably dead.’ What sort of a note is that?”That's actually quite funny. Although I think it deserves one of these:
Is This The Real Life: 7
The nod to cliche is very deliberate - though well-played in this case.
Bast shakes the unconscious Devan around a bit before asking Kvothe who he is.
“Some unlucky sod who happened to be on the road at the wrong time,” Kote said dismissively. “Don’t shake him too much. His head might be on a little loose.”
You Fucking Sociopath: 2
I genuinely was not expecting to get much mileage out of this count so soon, but come on. Head trauma that knocks you out for significant periods of time is fucking dangerous, and Kvothe should fucking know it. I can give Bast a pass because he's not entirely human and we don't know what his moral compass looks like yet, but Kvothe should not be meeting his manhandling Devan with a fucking joke. I know Kvothe's supposed to be all tired and world-weary and old-before-his-time and shit, but he's still supposed to fucking care! Rothfuss goes out of his way in later chapters to show Kvothe caring about the people in Newarre: he (spoilers) even risks revealing his identity - the thing he's kept so carefully hidden Bast thinks it's destroying him by inches - to stop a local boy from enlisting! He should be well aware that Devan is one wrong move away from a cranial bleed that could literally kill him, and he should fucking well give a damn.
Asshole.
Bast is pissed, Kvothe is dismissive, and the two of them get Devan upstairs and tuck him into bed, where he will probably die of a massive intracranial hematoma before the night is out thanks to Bast jiggling him and Kvothe not giving a shit.
Assholes.
Kvothe asks Bast to help stitch him up, offering up his medical supplies to help.
Bast sniffed disdainfully. “I will use my own needles, thank you very much. Good honest bone. None of your nasty jagged iron things, stabbing you like little slivers of hate.”
I Have An Interrogative: 16
So, as best I can tell, iron has been used for surgical needles...for about five minutes in the middle of the 15th century. Iron is a spectacularly bad metal for surgical needles, because if it's pure then it's soft and prone to bending, and if it has enough carbon in it to be strong it's brittle and prone to breakage. For as long as steel has been around, it has been preferred over iron for surgical needles, with iron only really used during that brief period when steel was much more expensive to manufacture, making iron needles an occasional poor man's alternative. Since we know the Kingkiller-verse has blast furnaces and steel is reasonably ubiquitous, I have to wonder why Kvothe has iron needles at all instead of steel, silver or copper.
This also raises a wider question about Bast: if we're in an industrial period wherein steel exists but is expensive to manufacture - which is the only way Kvothe's having iron needles makes even a little bit of sense - then how is Bast able to exist in the human world at all? Iron has been absolutely ubiquitous in human manufacturing since the literal Iron Age, and never more so than in the period just before steel became commonplace, when improved smelting techniques made iron cheap and easy to work with as well as to obtain. Bast shouldn't be able to open a door or window without running into an iron handle; he shouldn't be able to touch a wine barrel without encountering iron hoops; he shouldn't be able to cook, clean or stoke the fire without using iron utensils. Bast's life at the Waystone should be an endless agony of iron-induced torment, and, while it certainly adds to his character to imagine that that's the case and that he's choosing to stay anyway out of love for Kvothe, there's really nothing in the text to back that up.
I Have An Interrogative: 17
Oh, and one last thing: bone might be the oldest known material for needles, but that doesn't make it a good one for suturing. The nature of the material means that bone needles have bulky eyes; combined with the necessary doubled thread around the eye, a bone needle could encounter such resistance trying to get through flesh that the eye would snap right off in the wound. Copper, bronze and silver needles have also been around for millennia, and it would be just as airy-fairy and far less dangerous for Bast to use silver instead of bone.
I Have An Interrogative: 18
I Know Stuff: 6
Knowing bone was once a needle material is only half the equation; the other half is knowing it was probably never used for sutures.
Bast stitches Kvothe up, commenting on how his "Bloodless" epithet and bloody wounds aren't quite matching up.
“Don’t believe everything you hear in stories, Bast. They lie to you.”
Is This The Real Life: 8
This story is lying to me about proper wound care.
Bast is amazed that Kvothe took on five scrael and won:
“Anpauen, Reshi,” Bast said, shaking his head as he threaded a bone needle with something thinner and finer than gut. “You should be dead. You should be dead twice.”The conlang doesn't bother me here because it's one word that's clearly an expletive. There's nothing to parse, so there's nothing really to fuck up. The "thinner and finer than gut" does bother me, because it only sounds impressive and fantastical if you don't know that silk has been used for surgical thread for thousands of years, and certain surgical techniques of the mid-18th century even used fine gold and silver wire.
I Have An Interrogative: 19
I'm tempted to give Kvothe a belated Stu Stew count at this point, because Bast is right. From what we've seen of the scrael, Kvothe shouldn't have been able to beat them alone, and a big problem with Devan being there to see how deadly the scrael are but missing the actual fight is that we have nothing beyond your standard Stu invulnerability clause to suggest how he did it. I'm going to hold off, though, because in this instance it is possible that the third book will come around and finally give us Kvothe's account of that fight, which might - emphasis on might - take it out of Gary Stu territory and into somewhere more believable.
Bast bent to his work. “This will sting a bit,” he said, his hands strangely gentle. “Honestly Reshi, I can’t see how you’ve managed to stay alive this long.
Kote shrugged again and closed his eyes. “Neither do I, Bast,” he said. His voice was tired and grey.
Simile Soup: 22
I really hate it when sounds are described as colours. I'm a synaesthete, so it bothers me specifically when authors pick the wrong colours, but even if I weren't it's still almost always clunky, especially when it's something as trite as "his voice was grey".
Later, Bast pulls an Edward Cullen and sneaks into Kvothe's room to watch him sleep. He is so overcome by the experience that he waxes poetical over it:
“How odd to watch a mortal kindle
Then to dwindle day by day.
Knowing their bright souls are tinder
And the wind will have its way.
Would I could my own fire lend.
What does your flickering portend?”
Kvothe The Raven: 1
Rothfuss has a poetry problem. Actually, Rothfuss has two poetry problems: one is that he clearly hates poets, and all his major characters are quite happy to be his mouthpieces for that hatred whether it fits their characters or not. The other is that Rothfuss is, himself, an abjectly terrible poet. The two problems might be related, now that I think about it.
I know poetry is highly subjective, arguably more than many other art forms because it can be both abstract and dense at the same time. I know I'm not much of a poet myself; my standard-issue middle-school angst had the seeds of some decent wordplay but I was never keen enough on the medium to develop the necessary discipline for it.
But come on: look at the above and tell me it isn't Poetry 101, at absolute best. It's utterly superficial: Bast is saying exactly what's on his mind; he's just doing it in rhyme. It doesn't have a strong voice, either as Bast's own or as the more abstract voice of a non-human trying to parse the human condition. And that final rhyming couplet is just cringe-worthy: it's superficial, it's painfully navel-gazing, and it's not a fraction as ominous and portentous as it's trying to be.
So from here on out, this count will serve double duty: first to tally every time Rothfuss has a character insult poets or poetry for no good reason, and second to tally every time Rothfuss beats me over the head with his own godawful verse.
Kvothe The Raven: 3
That's two retroactively for the nursery rhymes. As plot devices they fail because they're so superficial; as poetry (even childish poetry) they fail for much the same reason.
NaNoPadMo: 13
And that's for the chapter as a whole. While it was, again, mercifully short, it really had no reason to exist. At best, it emphasised the already-established dynamic of Kvothe and Bast's relationship; at worst, it once again delayed getting to the actual story and reminded us that Kvothe is a fucking sociopath.
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