He is also supposedly almost forty(!) and has a son (!!) but troisoiseaux and I agreed that it’s impossible to see him as older than about 27; he has SUCH strong Hamlet vibes.
If it helps, Hamlet's age is textually a disaster, too.
Kay insists that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except the queen (possibly because the queen is one of the few people in Camelot who is nice to him, churl or not), while in fact giving so many damns about so many things that he might actually die if he ever once allowed himself to consider just how much he cares, and how little he is cared about in return.
No lie; Kay cares from space. Because I have only so much time for misunderstood cinnamon rolls, however, I really appreciate the less principled aspects of Kay's self-inflicted reputation, like the incredible jaundice of his assessments of everyone and their relationships even in cases where they actually look all right to the reader or his tendency even in a life-or-death climactic joust to explain that he could totally have turned his mounted opponent's lance with his naked sword while on foot if he hadn't been carrying some other jerk's blade at the time. His narrative voice makes a wonderful parallax between the one person in the room with their head screwed on straight and the person who can't get out of their own way long enough to ask the right questions without antagonizing everyone they need answers from, which is a very funny but also structurally clever problem to give a detective character, especially one who is working overtime to reign in their sarcasm for exactly that reason and is constantly reminded that their efforts are going for naught. It goes by quickly in the text, but I find Kay's experience of the spell of melancholia to be book-stoppingly piercing, because it's a case of magically amplified depression, it isn't objectively the truth, if nothing else it's disproved by the last chapter with Guenevere, but it is so clearly much of what he fears to secretly believes about himself and because this novel is written from so deep inside the meta there's no event horizon in sight, he's right that future ages will sing of the glories of Lancelot and Tristram and remember him as a churl—a conscientious one perhaps, but still. I have a lot of feelings about this book.
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Date: 2022-08-17 08:30 pm (UTC)If it helps, Hamlet's age is textually a disaster, too.
Kay insists that he doesn’t give a damn about anything except the queen (possibly because the queen is one of the few people in Camelot who is nice to him, churl or not), while in fact giving so many damns about so many things that he might actually die if he ever once allowed himself to consider just how much he cares, and how little he is cared about in return.
No lie; Kay cares from space. Because I have only so much time for misunderstood cinnamon rolls, however, I really appreciate the less principled aspects of Kay's self-inflicted reputation, like the incredible jaundice of his assessments of everyone and their relationships even in cases where they actually look all right to the reader or his tendency even in a life-or-death climactic joust to explain that he could totally have turned his mounted opponent's lance with his naked sword while on foot if he hadn't been carrying some other jerk's blade at the time. His narrative voice makes a wonderful parallax between the one person in the room with their head screwed on straight and the person who can't get out of their own way long enough to ask the right questions without antagonizing everyone they need answers from, which is a very funny but also structurally clever problem to give a detective character, especially one who is working overtime to reign in their sarcasm for exactly that reason and is constantly reminded that their efforts are going for naught. It goes by quickly in the text, but I find Kay's experience of the spell of melancholia to be book-stoppingly piercing, because it's a case of magically amplified depression, it isn't objectively the truth, if nothing else it's disproved by the last chapter with Guenevere, but it is so clearly much of what he fears to secretly believes about himself and because this novel is written from so deep inside the meta there's no event horizon in sight, he's right that future ages will sing of the glories of Lancelot and Tristram and remember him as a churl—a conscientious one perhaps, but still. I have a lot of feelings about this book.