Chapter 18: Roads to Safe Places
In which Galatea has some things to say about mental health.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Bast showed off his Plot Armour™ and Kvothe actually emoted for once.
PERHAPS THE GREATEST FACULTY our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.
Oh, fuck off.
We're back in the narrative proper, and before we can actually get anywhere near the story, Rothfuss has to beat us over the head with five full paragraphs of his invented psychology of trauma response. And look, I'm no psychologist, but this just feels...icky.
People in the Kingkiller-verse are human. There is nothing whatsoever, beyond the ability of some of them to use magic, to suggest that anyone in these books has physiology or psychology any different to a real homo sapiens. And for real homo sapiens, trauma response is complicated, multi-faceted, and - for a lot of people - deeply shitty for a very long time. We don't move through "four doors...according to [our] need". Our brains often have no idea what we need, so they'll keep us from sleeping, or alter our inhibitions, or throw horrible memories at us at the worst possible time for no good reason. Used well, this complexity can make for engaging characters at battle with their own psychology as much as with external forces.
Rothfuss doesn't want to use it well; he doesn't want to use it at all. Instead he gives us this nice, pat, pop psychology that he frames as some fucking revelation but that really is full of false equivalencies (passing out from trauma ≠ falling asleep) and outright bullshit (simply forgetting about a trauma is not generally considered a healthy response). It reads, quite frankly, as an insult to anyone actually recovering from trauma, and I would like Rothfuss to get the fuck out of this lane.
Simile Soup: 95
That's one count for the metaphor as a whole, one for each "door", and one for every excessive explanation or false equivalence.
I feel very strongly about mental health, readers. I've been cursed with a chemically-imbalanced brain but blessed with a truly wonderful therapist, so I speak from some degree of experience. It is a little hyperbolic to say that shit like this is literally dangerous, but not much. Readers - particularly younger readers - often turn to fiction to help parse their own experiences. Empathising with a literary character experiencing trauma is a great way to learn to talk about one's own mental health struggles, from a young child feeling "like Eeyore" to express generalised sadness or depression, to a teenager under pressure empathising with Katniss' distrust and anger after being made unwilling leader of a rebellion.
Books that are successful at helping people parse their own struggles give us characters with believable emotional responses, in whom we can see ourselves and to whose experiences we can map our own. What they overwhelmingly do not do is tell us, "There are six kinds of people in this world: the Poohs, the Piglets, the Eeyores..." Doing such a thing is wrong on so many levels: it's boring, it's hand-holdy, it's condescending as fuck, and it's a bad goddamn idea. When I say such a thing is potentially dangerous, I mean I can absolutely imagine a reader who's experienced loss like Kvothe's reading this passage, seeing that the first two "doors" - sleep and forgetting - are not at all working for them, and then being told that the remaining options are madness and death.
Such a reader isn't stupid or oversimplifying. Such a reader is legitimately looking to find some comfort and understanding in a piece of fiction, and being told things about trauma response that are total horseshit.
I Know Stuff: 25
One for the metaphor as a whole, and one for each "door" - and believe me, I'm angry enough that it's a struggle not to squeeze more into this count out of spite.
There's a really simple fix to the problem of this section: cut it out.
NaNoPadMo: 30
Instead of preaching his pap to us, Rothfuss could have gone straight to Kvothe sleeping for days out of depression and exhaustion, then forgetting details that were too painful to remember. Kvothe could even say something like:
I learned to think of parts of my mind as doors: the door of sleep, the door of forgetting. If I pushed the memories behind those doors, they felt less as though they would drown me. If I did not lock them behind the doors of sleep and forgetting, I feared the doors that remained, for those were madness and death.
It's the exact same principle, but presented subjectively, as part of Kvothe's lived experience. That has the dual benefits of keeping us in the actual story - something at which Rothfuss objectively sucks - and allowing a reader to empathise with Kvothe as much or as little as is right for them, instead of trying to accept nonsense dogma.
When we do get to Kvothe's actual experience, it's expectedly metaphor-heavy and way too literal about these bullshit "doors", but at least it's actual experience.
NaNoPadMo: 32
Simile Soup: 103
We then head into a dream sequence, and I actually kind of like it. Kvothe wanders through the forest being told things by a guide, who changes from one of the troupers, to Abenthy, to Arliden, to Abenthy again. The surreal quality of the shifts work well; the litany of survival information given by the trouper actually feels believable as Kvothe's sleeping mind calling up random information as a distraction from his trauma. Rothfuss blends pieces of information about real and imaginary plants near-seamlessly, and avoids over-explaining everything with uncharacteristic grace.
“This is willow. You can chew the bark to lessen pains.” It was bitter and slightly gritty. “This is itchroot, don’t touch the leaves.” I didn’t.
Ignoring the comma splice for a second, isn't that elegant? For the first time ever, Rothfuss uses reaction to imply action, telling us that Kvothe chewed the willow by showing us how it tastes. This whole dream sequence is elegant, efficient, and stylistically distinct, and, aside from some punctuation errors and an obvious chapter title drop, I really can't find a thing wrong with it.
Alert The Editor: 151
Title Drop: 26
I could speculate for hours on why this whole section is actually really good (it even has a pair of appropriate em-dashes!) but I really don't have a particular theory I like, so let's just give Rothfuss a well-deserved - if slightly confused - round of applause and move on.
When Kvothe wakes up, we tumble into a dry laundry list of the things he does to manage some kind of survival in the woods. I think it's supposed to evoke the way Kvothe is focusing on getting by from one moment to the next, again as a distraction from his trauma. We even get a little lampshading:
Oaks and birches crowded each other for space. Their trunks made patterns of alternating light and dark beneath the canopy of branches. A small rivulet ran from the pool across some rocks and away to the east. It may have been beautiful, but I didn’t notice.
After the elegance of the dream sequence, it is a distinctly inelegant choice to have your narrator describe a scene in words that clearly evoke beauty, then say "I didn't notice any beauty".
Over-Reliable Narrator: 14
And the rest of it's just kind of boring. There's a section that evokes an early part of The Hunger Games, in which Kvothe knows to find water first, then has to force himself to drink only a little and wait to make sure it isn't contaminated, despite his raging thirst. The difference is that, in The Hunger Games, that section has a really clear point: that any part of the arena could be deliberately rigged to kill the competitors, and even if that's not the case the competitors' own ignorance is as deadly a foe as the traps in the arena. The prose forcing us to wait with Katniss as she makes sure the water is safe puts us right with her in that terrible choice between two potential deaths, keeping the tension high by reminding the reader that safety is always illusory in the arena.
Here, this section doesn't have that point. We know the forest doesn't kill Kvothe. We know it doesn't even damage him badly, because we've seen Kvothe as Kote, years later and physically fine. "Survival" isn't the great antagonist of this book, the way it is in The Hunger Games. We know from the blurb, the framing narrative, and the sheer size of the book that any time Kvothe spends in the woods is, at best, a pit stop on the way to the real story, which makes our waiting in real-time for Kvothe to test the safety of the water what now?
NaNoPadMo: 33
That now.
Once again, though, Rothfuss ends the chapter strong. First Kvothe finds a rabbit in his snare and actually has a believable trauma response:
I took out my small knife and remembered how Laclith had shown me to dress a rabbit. Then I thought of the blood and how it would feel on my hands.
While the description of Kvothe's preceding and following actions - checking the snare, throwing up, cutting the rabbit loose - is still terribly dry, this moment here adds some emotional weight to it without slapping the reader upside the head.
And while there's really no style to it whatsoever, the remainder of the chapter clips along briskly, with Kvothe finding some safe plants to eat, setting a new and deadlier snare, and focusing on the business of survival. Again: a dry laundry list of actions with no style, but it is actually a fairly effective transition to the next phase of Kvothe's story, in which he must learn to get by alone.
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