Oh 100% yes! Itâs a big deal that the prologue is blatantly misleading, by the time youâve heard the details of the real story.
One of my CLEAREST memories of the many, many âoh shit we are doing things with thatâ moments â in which we realize that a recurring detail or âjokeâ actually does have backstory and thematic relevance â I had reading TGCF books (arcs) 1 and 2 was in book 2 when we reach the scene where Xie Lian refuses to apologize for saving a childâs life, and we see exactly how much heâs been reduced in the retelling.
The prologue/propaganda version reduces his thoughtful, well-reasoned discussions to these pithy one-liners that are easy to repeat as part of a story and present as naĂŻve, unfounded opinions.
And years later, I still remember the feeling of reading book two and realizing, for the first time, that all of his kindness, his consideration for the feelings of others of any class, his consciousness of his own power and the effect that kind of thing had on people? He ALWAYS HAD THAT. Everyone, even the narration, would have you believe so many of his fantastic, thoughtful, insightful qualities, were the result of âlearning somethingâ where he used to be naĂŻve.
Meeting a young Xie Lian who was not only less naĂŻve than anyone else had told you, but also not nearly as naĂŻve as even Xie Lian has been indicating himself? Narrative-shaping right there.
There had already been implications in book 1 that Xie Lian wasnât ok and that not reacting to pain was ultimately going to be more about trauma than the comedy Xie Lian has learned to try and make it, but realizing that heâs learned to make fun of himself on an ideological level? In addition to on a physical one?
THAT was the point I sat up and went âoh, something is going to go WRONG wrong here in this flashback. There is SOMETHING ELSE going on here.â
And then the whole flashback and major portions of book 3 and basically the rest of the novel was more or less about the disconnect between the official story/the version of you known to the public, and the true/private you. For our main characters both, and many, many side characters as well.
We even do this in BOTH FLASHBACKS. The contrast is even more stark, in the second, between the actual circumstances and motivations behind Xie Lianâs banishment, and the neat, comfortable, easily-digested version that most of heaven accepted for centuries.
And then after everything, we END the novel on âwhat legend says about these characters/godsâ as in, the story commonly told by people who donât know all the details. You know, a parallel bookend to the prologue. In case it wasnât already clear that thatâs the type of unreliable version of the story the introduction was.
The fact that learning the *real* story via flashback so dramatically overturns our initial impressions and operating understanding of the story â learning that we also, the reader, have been susceptible to the in-narrative propaganda and the simplest assumptions â is such a huge part of this book, structurally and thematically, to me.
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