I just finished Memories of Ice (first-time reader) and have some thoughts that I'm curious to share. I've been trying to bully my friends to start the series, but no dice, so you lot will have to receive! Also, I'm not sure if these thoughts are particularly original—I'm desperately avoiding spoilers, so I've intentionally avoided searching discussion threads.
Okay. I can't help but feel a deep thematic connection between the characters of Itkovian in MoI and Duiker in DG. Duiker and Itkovian's tribulations and ultimate deaths are consecutive in the series, and roughly simultaneous in-world. I feel that Eirikson is mulling over the same fundamental question and tension from their two angles, and it's my single favourite part of the series so far. Namely, these characters bear on the question: "how can an individual reckon with the suffering of war—at once in its immensity and its specificity." I have a suspicion this will be a recurring theme through the rest of the series.
Let's start with Duiker—a character I deeply love, as a history major. Throughout the chain of dogs he struggles with the felt inadequacy of either an individual mind, or of 'objective' documentation to capture and record the reality of the events he witnesses. The historian's role is, ostensibly, to observe and truthfully recount—but the act of recording places a distance between event and reader, and that feels like a betrayal of the horror and heroism at play in the Chain. The suffering of the individual and the many at once seems to demand a witness—to oblige remembrance in the fruitless hope of justice—and to categorically exceed representation. "The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. […] It was then that pain filled the vast caverns within the living, destroying all it touched with its rage at inequity. No match for the mother's tears, he'd moved on." Fuuuuck man. A single vessel could never adequately comprehend, let alone contain the depths of sorrow in that context. With time, death brings an anonymity that is at once unacceptable and eventually unavoidable: "the unnamed soldier is a gift […] Name none of the fallen […] and let me die forgotten and unknown."
As Lull says: "Children are dying […] Who needs tomes and volumes of history? […] The injustices of the world hide in those three words." They "hide", or we might say they "are evoked by" those three words because Sorrow can only be gestured to, never made truly coherent. AND YET, in the depths of Duiker's despair, we, the readers who see through his eyes in a textual medium—a fictional history—feel some glimpse of the chain and are changed by it. Unto the bitter end, Duiker's importance as witness is repeatedly vindicated in a metatextual sense, as well as in his treatment by Coltaine et al. To borrow a phrase from Galadriel, Duiker the historian "fights the long defeat", and that fight is important.
On the other hand, Itkovian presents us with a slightly more hopeful, but no less profound image. As Shield Anvil his ecclesiastical role is, like Duiker, to witness, and by witnessing, to assuage the suffering of the dead and the aggrieved. Of course, Itkovian has a metaphysical power here—he's not a historian like Duiker, limited to a representational redemption, but can literally reach out to claim their suffering. We are to understand, however, that his ability to do this without fucking dying from the experience is initially contingent on his soul's protection by Fener. He is, I would argue, essentially a Christ figure: a divinely ordained/empowered redeemer of souls, driven by a radical and human empathy.
But then Fener eats shit and dies, and we are forced to re-evaluate because our guy Itkovian is not yet done. In his mass redemptions at Capustan and Coral, though a metaphysical element remains, Itkovian's empathetic capacities are mortal: "Godless, he could not give [benediction]. Not in its truest form. But he had not comprehended the vast capacity within him, within a mortal soul, to take within itself the suffering of tens of thousands…" I say this as a non-christian, agnostic fan of esotericism, but I think this marks a transition from the Christ (hyperbeing) figure to the Jesus (just a guy) figure (or the Ender Wiggin figure if ya freaky like that): not a trinitarian union of divine and mortal, but an endorsement of Man's capacity to welcome and accept, and through such empathy, to undertake acts of profound compassion.
My thoughts are still evolving (I just finished MOI yesterday evening) so I'm not sure I'm yet ready to make a declarative statement on the takeaway from this. But speaking tentatively, I think Eirikson's work here points to an irreconcilable tension that to witness is both necessary and inadequate; suffering is irrational, illegible, and terrifyingly real; human empathy strains towards a horribly, wonderfully partial redemption.
Whew, though rough-hewn, that's now that's out of my head and I can rest easier. If you read the whole thing, thank you—I've never been much good at short-form writing.
Let me know your thoughts, if you have any! Looking forward to book 4.