The epigram -- enigmatic, yet revealing "in the light of the eternity of the end" (from the timeless tome I Ching):
"A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising-sun."
"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future."
No kidding. From the last chapter, XXVIII, of "The Citadel of the Autarch": the title -- "Resurrection." The circle of memory is complete. This is what this first-person account of the torturer's apprentice Severian is made of: memory and its shadows, casting its darkness across the future.
"The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile."
And this is so. The landscape of the book is determined by its recurrent buildings, rivers and mountains. And in the next sentence, the third, Wolfe introducing his third theme, one of Eliot's: the drowning.
The first of the buildings: The Citadel.
And then that long, extended metaphor (where Wolfe first lost me the first time through) of memory that re-introduces this unforgotten theme. Forgive me if I sound these themes so hard and so true so early, but it is in these beginnings that we may deduce the meaning we find in the end.
Then, again: the identification of the memory (for that is what, most of all, Severian is) with the Commonwealth "reconstituting itself each morning." For Severian is the New Sun, as the torturer (as are we all), the Conciliator, the Lictor, the Autarch.
Attempting to get in the graveyard. And even tho' the guard is down, the first intercession of a higher authority, the "volunteers."
And the second chapter tells us of the drowning already mentioned in the first chapter: "That is why I have begun this account ... with the aftermath of our swim, on which I ... had so nearly drowned." The description of said "drowning," ends at the precise moment, before the gate, at which the first chapter begins. Here we have the first recurrence of the thematic gate, the "gate" we shall see at the beginning and end of each book.
These, of course, are only my first thoughts upon my first re-reading; for, while Severian's memory may "in the final accounting, lose nothing" we who are not so fortunate may follow his veiled admonishment at the end of this long document, as his own composition of it ends:
"This manuscript I shall send to Master Ultar; but while I am on the ship when I cannot sleep and have tired of reading, I shall write it out again -- I who forget nothing -- every word, just as I have written it here."
And yet more explicitly:
"Have I told you all I promised? I am aware that at various places in my narrative I have pledged that this or that should me made clear in the knitting up of the story. I remember, then, all, I am sure, but then I remember so much, else before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again."
If Gene Wolfe can take seven years in the composition of this mysteriously divided unity, we can, at least, grant it a second look. And what a puzzling thing this is upon the first reading. To be introduced to a consciousness so similar to our own, yet so frighteningly separated, one could be easily disenchanted w/ this enigmatic work. The very fact of Severian's indelible memory adds so much depth of consciousness to this work -- a consciousness that knows the future of the events yet to be related, recalls in detail those things past, liberally interspersed with vivid dreams.
A work of time: time works in all aspects -- the far future setting, and the mysterious intervention of time-travellers.
Memory and dream. -- and always of the dog, for Severian remembers his dreams in the same detail that he recalls all else. And the dog, Triskeles, recurs in more the one of them.
We're your eyes, your ears ...
Oh great, my five senses come to my rescue ...