A Few Rememberings

As of this very moment I am on page 469 of The Subtle Knife. Serafina Pekkala found Lyra and Will saving them from a mob of vengeful children, which reminded me of the mob mentality in Lord of the Flies when the boys beat another boy to death because they thought he was some animal. Will and Lyra are walking to a cave about a half hour walk from where they had been to meet the witches near a cave safely far away from the Specters...a good place to stop reading for a bit.

I was thinking about Lyra in comparison to Alice. Alice and Lyra, first of all, seem to like to ask a lot of questions. Alice is an altogether unimaginative and unremarkable girl. Lyra, I would argue is somewhat of the same....Lyra thinks to herself when she finds out the alethiometer was stolen from her, "Without the alethiometer, she was...just a little girl, lost." Lyra is granted the gift of reading the alethiometer, and without that ability she is altogether useless to the story. I don't think her actually being a child has much to do with her ability because Mary Malone can communicate with Dust. So it really is that state of mind that is described in the Keats poem. Lyra is like a pawn in a very large scale chess game. She isn't even all that likeable because she is often a stubborn, stuck up, brat. Alice isn't a brat really, but she isn't all that likeable.....all the other characters are more likeable than she is...maybe because they are more interesting. Not to say that Lyra isn't interesting. Lyra is brave, I'll give her that.

To revisit my comment about Lyra being a pawn in a chess game...page 320 of The Subtle Knife Lyra asks the alethiometer if Will is a friend or an enemy, it answers, "He is a murderer." Therefore Lyra rationalizes that she can trust Will. I asked Sutter what if how he would respond if he was in Lyra's place, and he would of thought of Will the "murderer" as an enemy. So the answers Dust gives to Lyra are very much made for how Lyra thinks. New Historicist critics argue that there are no such things as facts or truth. There are only versions and interpretations of truth. So when the the alethiometer gives Lyra answers to her questions, it seems that it is manipulating her, and by it, I mean Dust. It doesn't give her direct "facts," but rather responds in such a way as to guide her thoughts and actions. But I don't think it is manipulating or guiding her as it first appears. We discussed in class about how truth in the alethiometer is remembering. Images of the soul. Unforgetting. My only way of explaining this to myself is that maybe the Dust communicating with Lyra through the alethiometer is helping her remember her destiny. And she certainly has a destiny because everyone knows what she has to do, except her. For example the prophecies that the witches have. And if Dust is consciousness, then I guess that makes sense.

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Quotes from The Golden Compass that I like...among many many many

page 274 of The Golden Compass:

Lord Asriel says to Lyra, "Anyway, it's what the church has taught for thousands of years. And when Rusakov discovered Dust, at last there was a physical proof that something happened when innocence changed into experience."

page 24 of The Golden Compass:

"'That's the duty of the old,' said the Librarian, 'to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.'
They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious."