Archive for category Fifth Head of Cerberus

Desanctifying Victor Trenchard: some notes on Peter Wright’s “Confounding the Skin and the Mask”

Posted by Jonathan on Friday, 24 May, 2002

by Robert Borski

I’ve now had the opportunity to read Peter Wright’s “Confounding the Skin and the Mask” several times and it continues to generate much thought. Read the rest of this entry »


Confounding the Skin and the Mask: Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus and the Politics of Ambiguity

Posted by Jonathan on Tuesday, 15 January, 2002

by Peter Wright

Since its publication in 1972, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe’s collection of three inter-linked novellas, has earned a reputation for being the author’s most perplexing single volume. Such a reputation is entirely justified since ambiguity is the watchword to the text. More significantly, it is also an organising principle of form, a means of confounding interpretation, and a fundamental theme associated with Wolfe’s defining authorial obsessions: the subjectivity of perception, the unreliability of memory, and the nature of identity. Read the rest of this entry »


The Fifth Head of Cerberus reviewed

Posted by Jonathan on Tuesday, 28 August, 2001

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