"oblique" is a good way to put it! And inconsistent, from book to book. I think partly he explains the thinking when he wants to explain/justify the behaviour he thinks his readers might find not admirable in the characters he wants them to like. Or maybe this is only when the character is new to the reader? Hence - just thinking this out on the run - Shasta's thoughts are explained at length, as are Edmund's in the early chapters of LWW, but in VDT there's no such elaborate backgrounding given to that quarrel on Deathwater Island, because by then he expects his readers will accept Edmund's/Caspian's/Lucy's petty scrapping without wiping them as characters? (Though actually, I don't think highly of Caspian anyway. I think he's a fair portrait of someone who's learned bullying as a child, and never shakes it off - i.e. stays something of a bully all his life.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Re: head-canon collision
Date: 2014-11-23 12:01 pm (UTC)I think partly he explains the thinking when he wants to explain/justify the behaviour he thinks his readers might find not admirable in the characters he wants them to like.
Or maybe this is only when the character is new to the reader? Hence - just thinking this out on the run - Shasta's thoughts are explained at length, as are Edmund's in the early chapters of LWW, but in VDT there's no such elaborate backgrounding given to that quarrel on Deathwater Island, because by then he expects his readers will accept Edmund's/Caspian's/Lucy's petty scrapping without wiping them as characters? (Though actually, I don't think highly of Caspian anyway. I think he's a fair portrait of someone who's learned bullying as a child, and never shakes it off - i.e. stays something of a bully all his life.)