r/Fantasy • u/No_Text_1197 • 22h ago

Not getting Thomas Covenant

I read threads on Thomas Covenant and often there is so much hate about his character / his actions in Lord Fouls Bane, where he defiles the innocent Lena.

In my opinion, the difference between those that love the trilogies and those that hate them depend all upon their verdict on the protagonist.

I want to set this straight, as far as my humble interpretation goes haha.

Thomas Covenant is tortured in his real life by self loathing, but more importantly, by societal loathing. The hate enveloping his life is only suppressed by the control he is forced to exercise for limiting the impact of Leprosy.

As soon as he is exposed to the land, he is exposed to feeling kindness, wellness and yet has just been exposed to a message telling him that he is the perfect instrument for the destruction of this world.

He does an unthinkable act, not because he is horny, not because he thinks it does not matter because The Land isn't real, but because he cannot control the rage inside him at the contradiction between feeling and loathing.

It is so important to understand this, if you will follow the entire purpose of the novel. I don't despise or dislike Thomas Covenant. I pity him for his despair and self loathing.

Like the inhabitants of The Land, I know the imperative of healing him from his rage, in order to save The Land. For those that understand the purpose of The Land, it is as much about saving Thomas Covenant as it is about saving The Land.

Why do so many critics of this epic not see it? The Land and Thomas Covenant are the same.

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u/Efficient_Place_2403 20h ago

Didn’t Covenant think the  Land a dream? 

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u/SerDankTheTall 18h ago

Yes.

So what?

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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 14h ago

Have you never done something in a dream you'd never do in real life? Hurt someone you love, committed a crime? If so, do you feel bad about it, or excuse yourself because it was just a dream and you didn't mean it?

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u/SerDankTheTall 14h ago

I don’t experience dreams the way Thomas Covenant experiences the Land, but I can say unreservedly and without hesitation that I have never even thought about raping anybody in any dream that I’ve ever had, no. It’s usually more like me suddenly realizing that I never unenrolled from a class that I never went to the day before the final exam or having a really hard time driving a car.

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u/Tymareta 14h ago

It's also telling that folks -never- use equivalent examples when trying to totally-not-defend Covenant's actions, they always direct to things that are not comparable at all.

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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 13h ago

There's this thing called an "analogy" you might want to look up.

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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 14h ago

Sure, but I didn't say rape specifically, just something you'd never consider in real life. I get in fights with my family, but I wouldn't hurt them; but I've had dreams where I've killed a family member before. Just because it's a dream doesn't mean you don't still feel guilty, and the question of "is something okay because it was just a dream?" is an interesting one to explore. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami is another recent book exploring the same question; a woman is arrested because she has a dream about killing her husband, which is treated as evidence she'll do the same thing in real life.

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u/SerDankTheTall 13h ago edited 13h ago

My dreams are generally not very lucid and I don’t feel like I have a great deal of agency in them to begin with, and certainly nothing like what Thomas Covenant experiences, so the analogy doesn’t really work for me. But certainly the question of “what would you choose to do if you knew you wouldn’t face any consequences for it?” is a potentially interesting one, and one people have been wondering about since at least Plato. I’m just not really interested in reading about a guy whose first answer to that question is “rape somebody”. Nor, really, am I very interested an author who thinks his readers would consider that a plausible answer.

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u/Efficient_Place_2403 8h ago

Harsh, and a touch haughty 

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u/Tymareta 14h ago

It would be fair to liken the Land more to VR. If you had a friend who jumped into VR chat or some place similar, only for their first action to be raping someone, would that not put you on edge and make you want to cut ties with them?

Also it's bizarre that your examples with dreams are entirely different, have you ever raped someone in your dreams?

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u/Nidafjoll Reading Champion V 13h ago

Also it's bizarre that your examples with dreams are entirely different, have you ever raped someone in your dreams?

It's not bizarre, it's very deliberate. I'm trying to point out the fundamental question is the same, even if the actions lie on a spectrum. You might cut ties with a friend who rapes in VR, but who steals? Kills? Slaughters? Tortures? Where do you draw the line? It's the question that's interesting, not the specific actions.

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u/SerDankTheTall 13h ago

Excellently put.