The Fires of Heaven

by Robert Jordan

A theme running through my second attempt at The Wheel of Time is how ignorant I was twenty years ago of the literary structures that make these both interesting stories and well-constructed books. The hurdles I had to overcome: I was sixteen; I was reading only for plot (skimming any non-dialogue prose that built out the world); I didn’t understand general literary devices. 

For The Fires of Heaven, “unreliable narrator” is a concept that would have been extraordinarily useful. So too could I have used a comprehensive understanding of narrative perspective. Either one would have made Nynaeve an amazing character and not just the hyperbolic shrewish harpy at which my male teenage sensibilities (and probably also brain-hormones) recoiled.

Across the series, each chapter is loosely broken into 3rd person limited narration—one character spearheads the section, and you see what they think, feel, and do. Other people are filtered through their eyes. Now, that’s all well and good, but when I was sixteen or whatever, I just assumed whatever the narrator said was true:

When she had left the Two Rivers, it had been to protect young people from her village, snatched away in the night by an Aes Sedai. She had gone to the Tower still with the hope that she could somehow shelter them, and the added ambition of bringing down Moiraine for what she had done. The world had changed since then. Or maybe she only saw the world differently. No, it is not me that’s changed. I’m the same; it is everything else that’s different.

Nynaeve—who is still Nineveh to me, sorry—she is just a terror. And it isn’t that she’s a caricatured Womynist or a hypocrite played straight for comedy, but that she’s a tragic figure, a King Lear actively lying to herself about how truly her children must love her. She’s blocked from the True Source—she has to be angry to access her own power—because she is afraid of that power. She won’t admit to the fear, so can only overcome it when rage outweighs terror:

Nynaeve gave Uno and Ragan each a good glare before stalking off in the opposite direction. There she had had everything arranged properly, and they had to nearly ruin it all. Men always seemed to think violence could solve anything. If she had had a stout stick, she would have thumped all three of them about the shoulders until they saw reason.

The heart of The Fires of Heaven is Nynaeve coming to terms with ingrained hypocrisy, accepting her so-called weakness, and learning to, well, love herself. Corny, maybe, but true. Bravery isn’t having no fear, but facing your fear as best you can:

“I’m tired of being afraid,” Nynaeve said without taking her gaze from the beams. “I am s-so tired of being a c-coward.” The last words dissolved into tears she could neither stop nor hide, no matter how she scrubbed at her eyes. 

What I wrote about Perrin in The Shadow Rising holds true for Nynaeve in this volume; she is a microcosm to understand another of Rand’s problems. This time, it isn’t about delegating responsibility and accepting your limits, but about understanding—maybe even embracing—who you are; even if you don’t want to. Rand has to come to terms with Lews Therin: his past, his present, and his refusal to put women in danger, even to the point where Moiraine has to sacrifice herself to save him.

Oh yeah, Moiraine dies. It sucks. Although I can only assume it is a Gandalf the Grey move where he sacrifices himself to stop the Balrog and comes back as Gandalf the White—which, I suspect, is a different incarnation of Gandalf as he acts very differently and much more lamely, in my opinion—and so perhaps Moiraine will be back in some form. At least she took Lanfear with her, who was a big jerk and not at all a Vegeta-worthy comparison.

But enough about Lanfear, let’s swing back to Nynaeve. She is angry all the time: at herself; at everyone around her for doing exactly the types of things she constantly does. It is entertaining to watch her muddle everything up because she’s acting like a doofus all while criticizing everyone around her for being doofuses. But again, without recognizing that Nynaeve is in control of the narrative when the chapter is from her perspective—and she internally won’t admit to her hypocrisy—you’re left with a seemingly stochastic tension between what you thought the world within the books was and what the Nynaeve chapters say the world actually is. If you don’t know that unreliable narrators are a storytelling device—if you’re naive enough to believe everything on the page that isn’t between quotation marks—her chapters make you itch, like something fundamental is wrong and broken.

And speaking of “wrong and broken,” so much of these books—written in the idyllic American “The future’s so bright I gotta wear shades” 1990s— is depressingly apropos to the the way the world is progressing currently:

“I hope they never find it.” The innkeeper’s gray curls swung as she shook her head.

“The horn of Valere?” Elayne said. “Why ever not?”

“Why, my Lady, if they find it, it means the Last Battle is coming. The Dark One breaking free.” Mistress Jharen shivered. “The Light send the Horn is never found. That way, the Last Battle cannot happen, can it?” There did not seem to be much answer to such logic.

Just as there are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time, there are no beginnings nor endings to bad logic. Unfortunately.

Nor are there clear beginnings or ends to Nynaeve’s character growth. We get to see the root of her hypercritical aggression toward others stem from her own self-doubt, which likely began because she was the youngest Wisdom in Emond’s Field and wasn’t taken seriously by the older folks without threats and angry posturing. We see that self-doubt explode into overly extreme self-blame—like someone who says “I’m a monster” when they commit a minor transgression, effectively silencing any critique of their rudeness because they’re already punishing themselves worse than the social slight requires—when something goes wrong, and then watch as she backpedals herself back into a comfortable posture where most of the problems she caused are actually someone else’s fault. The Wheel of Time turns, and Nynaeve remains a relatable grouch.