Editing Gene Wolfe (section)

==Style==

Wolfe's writing frequently relies on the first-person perspectives of [[unreliable narrator]]s. He said: "Real people really are unreliable narrators all the time, even if they try to be reliable narrators."<ref name="PersonInterview"/> The causes for the unreliability of his characters vary. Some are naive, as in ''Pandora by Holly Hollander'' or ''The Knight''; others are not particularly intelligent<ref>''Shadows of the New Sun'', p. 112 – "I wanted to present a protagonist who isn't very intelligent.  Green isn't."</ref> (''There Are Doors''); Severian, from ''The Book of the New Sun'', tells his story from the perspective of his younger, ignorant self; and Latro of the ''Soldier'' series suffers from amnesia.

Wolfe wrote in a letter, "My definition of a great story has nothing to do with 'a varied and interesting background.' It is: ''One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.''"<ref>"From a Chain letter to George R. R. Martin and Greg Benford", July 10, 1982; as published in Gene Wolfe, ''Castle of Days'' (1992) [italics in source]</ref> In that spirit, Wolfe also left subtle hints and [[Lacuna (manuscripts)|lacunae]] that may never be explicitly referred to in the text. For example, a backyard full of [[morning glories]] is an intentional foreshadowing of events in ''Free Live Free'', but it is apparent only to a reader with a horticultural background, and a [[story within a story|story-within-the-story]] provides a clue to understanding ''Peace''.

Wolfe's language can also be a subject of confusion for the new reader. In the appendix to ''The Shadow of the Torturer,'' he says:

<blockquote>In rendering this book—originally composed in a tongue that has not achieved existence—into English, I might easily have saved myself a great deal of labor by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so. Thus in many instances I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts by their closest twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as ''peltast'', ''androgyn'', and ''exultant'' are substitutions of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive.<ref>{{cite book | last = Wolfe | first = Gene | title = Shadow & Claw | publisher = [[Tor Books]] | isbn = 978-0-312-89017-9 | page = [https://archive.org/details/shadowclaw0000wolf/page/211 211] | year = 1994 | url = https://archive.org/details/shadowclaw0000wolf/page/211 }}</ref></blockquote>

This character of the fictional "translator" of his novel provides a certain insight into Wolfe's writing: all of his terms—''[[fuligin]]'', ''[[Wikt:carnifex|carnifex]]'', ''[[thaumaturge]]'', and so on—are real words.