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by
Stacie Hanes
Terry Pratchett's six novels in the City Watch arc of the Discworld series are very carefully assembled, multi-layered satirical constructs, performing fantastic variations on Horatian and Juvenalian satire as well as other satirical modes aimed at various targets. The City Watch arc, composed of the titles Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, and the newly published Night Watch, are all parodies of not only fantasy but hardboiled detective novels.
Pratchett parodies and satirizes (sometimes simultaneously, sometimes by turns) much of the popular "sword and sorcery" fantasy and "dragons, dragons, everywhere" fantasy published since Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Nor does he spare Tolkien; but the satire aimed at fantasy novels, excepting the truly dreadful ones, is of the gentle, reflective Horatian type in which readers are urged to laugh quietly at the less logical aspects of their favorite novels, as well as at themselves.
Pratchett is less forgiving when dealing with real-world problems such as war and racism. These and other topics receive the same sort of treatment from him as the hunger in Ireland received from Jonathan Swift. The effect is withering—not to mention bitingly funny—when Pratchett's heroes arrest both armies in an imminent battle and the main character, Sir Samuel Vimes, is allowed to voice some scathing Juvenalian dialogue.
In addition, the novels are structured so that the entire world is both a parody of a fantasy world and an engaging world in its own right; each novel reads as a parody of the fantasy genre as a whole. Within the Discworld, the characters in each novel serve as components of the Horatian commentary on fantasy, while also being complex and sympathetic people about whom readers often come to care deeply. The main character in each book always has some sharply insightful, yet hilarious, observations about the situation presented in the novel.
The whole structure resembles a stage play; each Discworld novel, especially in the City Watch sub-series, has a backdrop of fantastic parody, an extensive Horatian supporting cast, and a Juvenalian hero who takes on the big, bad ideas.
Within this theatrical framework, Pratchett develops piercing insights about all manner of subjects. Because the books are very funny, he also reaches audiences other writers might not. The Discworld books are stunning examples of modern satire and an effective use of humor to make relevant points.
The City Watch novels are all about the human social institutions of law and government, and how human beings operate within their own structures.
I have abandoned my search for truth, and am now looking for a good fantasy.
—Ashleigh Brilliant
An epigraph is like a conversation piece; it can ignite a discussion but cannot see it through to the end. Brilliant suggests that absolute truths are hard to find; a comforting and pleasant, although not necessarily true, worldview based on the imagination might be easier to sustain. He is correct, to a point—but there it ends. It may not be necessary to abandon one for the other because fantasy has historically been one of our best tools for finding that which is true.
For thousands of years, we have used fantasy to teach our most valuable lessons. The fables of Æsop and Grimm's fairy tales are examples. They encapsulate knowledge our village elders have considered worth keeping and, most importantly, package it in a way that renders it acceptable to the youthful—indeed human—tendency to reject overt moral instruction. These fantasies engage us in that place where didactic language fails; as Bruno Bettelheim writes, "The fairy tale could not have its psychological impact on the child were it not first and foremost a work of art" (12).
Pratchett's carefully constructed Discworld novels contain a wealth of literary and social commentary in pageant form, and their satiric humor enables Pratchett to slide genuine wisdom past our innate resistance and reach that place in us where it can do the most damage to what he calls the "received opinions, out-of-date information, half-digested and completely unconsidered factoids . . . we use instead of thinking" (Smith, par. 8).
The Discworld books are, as the name suggests, about a flat world that rests on the backs of four elephants. The elephants stand upon the back of the star-turtle A'Tuin because it would be ridiculous to have them just floating along in space. The world-turtle appears in Hindu mythology, and Pratchett mentioned in a 1993 Usenet post that an African fan sent him a Bantu legend featuring some distant relative of the great A'Tuin. As Pratchett told Science Fiction Book Club interviewer Joyce Wiley, the world-turtle story "is one of the most pervasive myths on the planet. You find it somewhere on every continent."
Within the Discworld are four recognizable sets of novels, as well as a few that do not fall clearly into one of the story arcs. Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, The Fifth Elephant, and the newly published Night Watch are the City Watch titles. Others, such as The Last Hero and The Truth do not fit cleanly into these categories—although both of these feature characters from the City Watch subseries. As Edward James points out (119), the City Watch books are the most political of the Discworld novels. True enough. The Watch novels are set in the city of Ankh-Morpork and deal with metropolitan issues; the Witches novels are more rural, the Death novels more metaphysical, and the Rincewind novels, though containing metafictional elements, chiefly feature the main character quite reasonably running away from horrible things that are threatening, at very least, to disembowel him.
James states that Pratchett's own views do not emerge very clearly, which is true in one sense, because Pratchett places an extremely sympathetic character, Carrot, in the role of uncrowned king while at the same time using his hero, Samuel Vimes, to make very disparaging tirades, both spoken and thought, against the monarchy system. However, a simple attack on the monarchy may not be the main purpose of Pratchett's satire. We may not be able to pinpoint Pratchett's exact views regarding the Queen of England by reading the City Watch novels, but his position on authority, narrative convention, and easy answers is unmistakable: they should all be subject to thorough, unflinching question.
Pratchett's method is not, as Sgt. Colon of the City Watch puts it, "a misery wrapped in an enema" (Elephant 68). Rather, it is a carefully layered construct reminiscent of a theatrical production—earlier use of the word "pageant" was not accidental.
The backdrop against which all of Pratchett's characters move is a thorough parody of contemporary fantasy fiction, in all of its somewhat repetitive glory. It is important to note that parody and satire are not necessarily harsh or demeaning. Though Tolkien is satirized throughout, the tone is affectionate rather than hostile. This treatment, known as Horatian satire, is so named for the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus. Raymond Alden writes that "the satire of Horace is throughout characteristically reflective, above all things" (34).
Pratchett's parody becomes more caustic in reaction to the derivative fantasy that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after some of Tolkien's fans, toddlers when Lord of the Rings was published, had grown old enough to write their own books; the genre grew, but few apprentices possessed the genius of the master. Pratchett refers to this explosion of fantasy writing in an interview in Book magazine, saying, ". . . a lot of it—how shall I put it?—didn't bring that much to the party."
The difference is evident in the following passages from Guards! Guards!:
Now a black-robed figure scurried through the midnight streets, ducking from doorway to doorway, and reached a grim and forbidding portal. No mere doorway got that grim without effort, one felt. It looked as though the architect had been called in and given specific instructions. We want something eldritch in dark oak, he'd been told. So put an unpleasant gargoyle thing over the archway, give it a slam like the footfall of a giant and make it clear to everyone, in fact, that this isn't the kind of door that goes "ding-dong" when you press the bell. (4)
Longtime fantasy readers snort in horrified, yet amused, recognition—we've seen those dread portals, and shivered—but Pratchett is right. It takes special effort to make a door look that dreadful.
The parody becomes sharper later on, when the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night (it was their door) have summoned a dragon so their hand-picked hero may kill it in a staged, showy and, above all, public way and thereby become king. Samuel Vimes, Captain of the Night Watch, has observed some odd things about the dragon that has been terrorizing Ankh-Morpork—such as the fact that it ought not to be able to fly—and seeks the advice of the local dragon expert, Lady Sybil Ramkin. She tells him:
"If it's built like swamp dragons, it should weigh about twenty tons. Twenty tons! It's impossible. It's all down to weight and wingspan ratios, you see."
"I saw it drop off the tower like a swallow."
"I know. It should have torn its wings off and left a bloody great hole in the ground," said Lady Ramkin firmly. "You can't muck about with aerodynamics. You can't just scale up from small to big and leave it at that, you see. It's all a matter of muscle power and lifting surfaces." (143)
It still isn't terribly vicious, is it? But it does call to mind a certain class of fantasy novel and a certain type of author for whom magic is the ultimate answer to every problem, and for whom "deus ex machina" isn't a device but a way of life. Many readers may recognize the dragon-inhabited world of Pern from the example above. However, this is no insult to Anne McCaffrey, the author of the Pern series. Pratchett has often talked about the origins of the Discworld, as he does in the following excerpt from a December 1999 interview appearing in Locus:
Discworld started as an antidote to bad fantasy, because there was a big explosion of fantasy in the late '70s, an awful lot of it was highly derivative, and people weren't bringing new things to it. The first couple of books quite deliberately pastiched bits of other writers and things - good writers, because it's the good ones most people can spot: 'Ah, here's the Anne McCaffrey bit.' I was rapidly stitching together a kind of consensus fantasy universe. . . . (4)
The "bad" fantasy is notorious among fans for features such as the tendency of writers to treat horses like automobiles. As Diana Wynne Jones points out in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, the horses in inferior novels "are of a breed unique to Fantasyland. They are capable of galloping full-tilt all day without a rest. Sometimes they do not require food or water…" (73). She speculates that they reproduce after the manner of plants, by pollination.
Yet it is obvious that Pratchett bears some love for the genre as a whole, or he might still be working as Press Officer for England's Central Electricity Office (Western Region), or similar. In Meditations on Middle-Earth, Pratchett writes of The Lord of the Rings in unmistakably devoted terms. Readers must feel his love of the Middle-Earth landscape when he writes that he ". . . can still remember the luminous green of the beechwoods, the freezing air of the mountains, the terrifying darkness of the dwarf mines, the greenery on the slopes of Ithilien, west of Mordor, still holding out against the encroaching shadow" (80).
Though Pratchett says that he began the series for the fun of parodying bad fantasy, he maintains that "good fantasy . . . is worth parodying" (Silver par. 7).
The fondly remembered landscape of Middle-Earth is often used in descriptions of Überwald and the kingdom of Lancre, but never harshly. This gentle satire, of the Horatian type, forms the stage on which the Discworld characters move. It is where the stories themselves come from. Without folklore and the heroic fantasy genre, it is hard to imagine the existence of the Discworld.
Likewise, Pratchett's regard for the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is evident. From their humble—extremely so—origins as a motley group of three beaten men in Guards! Guards!, the Night Watch have, by the end of The Fifth Elephant, become a respectable force. Their drunken Captain, Sam Vimes, has become His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh-Morpork. Carrot Ironfoundersson, the young man (dwarf, by adoption) who began the process of revitalizing the Night Watch, is now Captain of the Watch. Sergeant Fred Colon and Corporal Nobbs have regained, or perhaps gained for the first time in their lives, a sense of pride in themselves and their profession. The City Watch has dozens of new recruits; word of their proficiency has spread so far that by the time the events of The Fifth Elephant take place, an Ankh-Morpork watchman could find a position on a police force in his or her choice of far-distant cities.
This Horatian supporting cast surrounds Vimes and satirizes all of the conventions of genre fantasy. In one memorable scene from Guards! Guards!, Sergeant Colon, Corporal "Nobby" Nobbs, and Lance-Constable Carrot wait atop a whiskey distillery for a chance to kill the dragon that has been menacing and selectively torching part of the city. Their plan to shoot it in its "voonerables" depends largely upon the dragon actually having such an exposed spot, and, naturally, they speculate on Colon's chances of hitting this spot and killing the dragon with one arrow—there won't be a chance for a second shot. The three watchmen know that in their sort of universe, million-to-one chances always come through, but they begin to worry that they might have only a thousand-to-one chance . . . which will, of course, never happen. They face their uncertainty with pure, unassailable Discworld logic: "So what we've got to do then," said Nobby slowly, "is adjust the odds…" (Guards! Guards! 296). The results appear several pages later:
Nobby put his head on one side.
'It looks promising,' he said critically. 'We might be nearly there. I reckon the chances of a man with soot on his face, his tongue sticking out, standing on one leg and singing The Hedgehog Song ever hitting a dragon's voonerables would be . . . what'd you say, Carrot?'
'A million to one, I reckon,' said Carrot virtuously. (302)
Their calculations are wrong, however, and Colon's arrow only makes the dragon notice the three men. In bewilderment and terror, Fred Colon yells, "But it couldn't have missed! […] It was a sodding last desperate million-to-one chance!"
But the Discworld will not be manipulated. The arrow does miss, and the dragon's fiery breath roars toward them. They jump from the roof of the building—which is a distillery, remember—just as the flames punch through the timbers to the thousands of gallons of whiskey in the vats below. It seems that Pratchett has betrayed his characters and their knowledge of the story in which they live, but it only seems so. "Fortunately," writes Pratchett, "the chances of anyone surviving the ensuing explosion were exactly a million-to-one" (305).
This scene satirizes many such instances of remarkable last-ditch efforts by heroes, but most notably the scene from The Hobbit in which the archer Bard kills the great dragon Smaug with a single arrow.
Yet we readers do not think worse of Sergeant Colon, Nobby, and Carrot. Their artlessness does not lead us to dismiss them as fools. No, the episode is simply funny. But wait, maybe it isn't simply funny; we really care whether they live or die, and fear that they may die.
Pratchett is less tender with racism and other nasty things people do to one another. His leading man, Sir Samuel Vimes, is allowed to voice some scathing commentary on various forms of inhumanity in every Watch novel. His Grace the Duke of Ankh-Morpork is the Juvenalian star of the show.
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis was the founder of Vimes's sort of satire—the poetry of tirade. Juvenal, the other satirist, wrote satire that was much different from the style Horace made popular. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is probably one of the best known examples of modern Juvenalian satire, yet it is couched in milder language than Pope's Essay on Criticism, or even parts of Gulliver's Travels. Whereas Horatian satire is usually characterized as friendly, Juvenalian satire is witheringly scornful and contains little of sympathy for its subject. Juvenal's observations of his fellow Romans led him to write in his first satire that "it is hard not to write satire. . . ." Upon due reflection, that phrase proves to be a subtle, but incredibly nasty, thing to say. One caveat is that Juvenal's satire, often described as invective, was at times abusive rather than righteous; the full force of his sixth satire, for instance, may not have been deserved by all women of the time. The same cannot reasonably be said of the dogmas against which Samuel Vimes inveighs. In language, Vimes's speeches fall somewhere between A Modest Proposal and Juvenal's first satire; in emotional tone, Vimes's anger rivals Juvenal at his most vehement.
In Men at Arms, a well-meaning but deranged Assassin with royalist sentiments sets in motion a series of events that results in the disbanding of the Night Watch. Edward d'Eath begins killing people in an effort to destabilize the government of Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, using a terrible new technological device invented by Leonard da Quirm: the Gonne. This device changes the dynamic of power in Ankh-Morpork; formerly it required a great deal of money or great skill to assassinate someone, but anyone with a steady hand can use the Gonne.
Edward's goal is not strongly supported by the powerful guild leaders of Ankh-Morpork. The Patrician's Machiavellian grasp of political reality has made the city into a working system within which the heads of all the guilds know that they are better off than ever before. But Edward, who believes the city to be hopelessly corrupt, wants the Return of the King.
Interestingly, all available evidence indicates that Carrot Ironfoundersson is the true heir to the throne. He has a mysterious, though non-magical, sword; he bears a crown-shaped birthmark; he is honest, good, brave, strong, handsome, and almost supernaturally charismatic. By the end of Jingo, even ambassadors from foreign countries are privy to the open secret of Carrot's lineage, but Carrot himself never openly acknowledges any of it.
Vimes, who in Men at Arms is still Captain of the Night Watch, is trying to solve the murders. The assassin has been trying to kill guild leaders and important citizens, but along the way he shoots a beggar girl whose misfortune it was to be mistaken for the Queen Molly, head of the Beggars' Guild. Though the killer is concerned with the powerful and influential, the people who die are ordinary people: a clown, the beggar maid, and a dwarven artisan named Bjorn Hammerhock. Few humans really notice these deaths, insignificant to anyone with money or position, but the arrest of Coalface the troll for Hammerhock's murder pushes Ankh-Morpork to the brink of the riots that the assassin wants.
Coalface could not possibly have committed the murder; the trolls know it, and the members of the Night Watch know it. But the Day Watch, headed by the corrupt and brainless Captain Quirke, arrests him because he's a troll. Thousands of years of enmity between trolls and dwarves make it an easy, plausible solution, but the dwarves are naturally infuriated.
In the midst of all this, Captain Vimes is supposed to retire and marry Lady Ramkin. He doesn't really want to retire, but Vetinari has disbanded the Night Watch and taken Vimes's sword. Vimes does not realize that Vetinari is deliberately provoking him so that he will break the rules to solve these crimes, but he does feel abused and manipulated by the men who run the city. Revived from drunken unconsciousness after having been relieved of his sword, Vimes bitterly asks the Night Watch:
—and what good's it all been? What good have I done? I've just worn out a lot of boots. There's no place in Ankh-Morpork for policemen! Who cares what's right or wrong? Assassins and thieves and trolls and dwarfs! Might as well have a bloody king and have done with it! (Men at Arms 219)
After an embarrassed silence, Carrot says, "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness, captain. That's what they say."
It is the wrong thing to say. The well-meant platitude does not calm Vimes but instead results in the following tirade: "'What?' Vimes' sudden rage was like a thunderclap. 'Who says that? When has that ever been true? It's the kind of thing people without power say to make it all seem less bloody awful, but it's just words, it never makes any difference—' (220)." Samuel Vimes has, however, made a difference. Vetinari revives the title of Watch Commander, elevating Vimes to the post and to the traditional rank of knight that goes along with it—all for his services to the city. Vimes has also influenced Carrot and set him on the path to being a good police officer. When Vimes is made Commander of the Watch, Carrot is promoted to the rank of captain.
Vimes's influence on Carrot leads directly to the events near the end of Jingo. Political machinations by the ruler of Klatch have led to more civil unrest than usual in Ankh-Morpork, and wartime racism against citizens of Klatchian heritage who live there. It is an offense almost too big to see and outside the normal scope of a law officer's duties. But what Sir Samuel Vimes sees, especially after the fire-bombing of a local shop run by the Klatchian Goriff family, are the crimes.
The conflict centers on the tiny island of Leshp, which has recently risen from the bottom of the sea; Klatch and Ankh-Morpork both desire possession of it. The aristocrats on both sides see only political and military advantage; Vimes knows that in wars, people die—the ordinary people he is sworn to defend, even from their rulers. When a Klatchian prince on a peacekeeping mission is attacked on Ankh-Morpork soil, Klatch needs no other reason to fight.
In the beginning of the novel Sir Samuel attends a meeting with the guild leaders and Lord Vetinari to discuss the developments after Leshp rises out of the Circle Sea. One vitally important issue is the nonexistence of an Ankh-Morporkian army. There are several reasons why there is no standing army, but one of them is the uprising that resulted in the overthrow of the monarchy and execution of Ankh-Morpork's last king by the Discworld equivalent of Oliver Cromwell. Lord Downey of the Assassins' Guild remarks on this aspect of the city's history: "We all know why people don't trust an army," said Lord Downey. "A lot of armed men, standing around with nothing to do . . . they start to get ideas . . ." (Jingo 17).
As it happens, this is a sensitive issue for Sir Samuel, who reacts with growing anger at Downey and the entire assemblage:
'My word,' he said, with glassy brightness, 'can this be a reference to 'Old Stoneface' Vimes, who led the city's militia in a revolt against the rule of a tyrannical monarch in an effort to bring some sort of freedom and justice to the place? I do believe it is! And was he Commander of the Watch at the time? Good heavens, yes, as a matter of fact he was! Was he hanged and dismembered and buried in five graves? And is he a distant ancestor of the current Commander? My word, the coincidences just pile up, don't they?' His voice went from manic cheerfulness to a growl. 'Right! That's got that over with. Now—has anyone got a point they wish to make?' (Jingo 17)
Part of Vimes's anger comes from his knowledge that the nobles and guild leaders regard him as a commoner and therefore an inconsequential person who is, nevertheless, extremely inconvenient to them. The rest comes from his knowledge that these same people have no concern at all for the citizens of Ankh-Morpork, of whom Vimes himself is only one.
The momentum of the push toward war cannot be stopped so early or so easily; despite Vimes's sweet reason, the nobles of Ankh-Morpork raise private armies and invade Klatch. But Vimes is a policeman, and he sets out to solve a crime—he pursues Prince Khufurah's attackers all the way to Klatch.
In a moment of mad justice, Vimes threatens to arrest Prince Cadram of Klatch, who deliberately began the war by staging the attempted assassination of his brother, Prince Khufurah. Lord Rust, an Ankh-Morpork nobleman who has participated eagerly in the effort to get a war going, ridicules him for it:
'Vimes, you have gone insane,' said Rust. 'You can't arrest the commander of an army!'
"Actually Mr. Vimes, I think we could,' said Carrot. "And the army, too. I mean, I don't see why we can't. We could charge them with behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace, sir. I mean, that's what warfare is.'
Vimes' face split into a manic grin. 'I like it.'
'But in fairness our—that is, the Ankh-Morpork army—are also—'
'Then you'd better arrest them too,' said Vimes. (286)
Vimes goes on, quite happily:
'Arrest the lot of 'em. Conspiracy to cause an affray,' he started to count on his fingers, 'going equipped to commit a crime, obstruction, threatening behavior, loitering with intent, loitering within tent, hah, traveling for the purpose of committing a crime, malicious lingering and carrying concealed weapons.' (286)
Although his distaste for the aristocracy and for politics is well-known, the Patrician creates Vimes Duke of Ankh-Morpork: because he is truly a devoted servant of the city, because he and some few loyal coppers derailed a war, because he can use Dux Vimes in more ways than he can use Sir Samuel, and, quite possibly, because he enjoys the way Sam Vimes squirms. Vimes does not want his new office, especially not the official uniform, which includes tights. But the truth is that Vimes is becoming more sophisticated, and his views on crime are just what the city needs. He wants to fight the old system, where people said that "there was one law for the rich and one law for the poor." Vimes doesn't believe this to be true. Instead, "There was no law for those who made the law, and no law for the incorrigibly lawless . . ." (Feet of Clay 162).
Over time, Samuel Vimes has an impact on the city through his simple refusal to go outside the rule of law. By his insistence and force of will, law comes to be expected in Ankh-Morpork.
As they say on the Discworld, the turtle moves. By the end of Night Watch, it can't be any other way. Vimes has traveled through time to apprehend Carcer, a dangerous psychopath—and has finally caught him. The man's atrocities are such that Vimes knows no one would condemn him for killing Carcer outright as soon as he's been arrested, but he won't do it. He turns him over to the impartial machine of justice, saying:
'I'm hurting and I'm still doing it all by the book.' [….]
'The machine ain't broken, Carcer. The machine is waiting for you,' he said, tearing a sleeve off the man's own shirt and fashioning it into a crude binding for his ankles. 'The city will kill you dead. The proper wheels'll turn. It'll be fair, I'll make sure of that. . . . (359)
Vimes has grown into his Dukedom and his role as a leader, becoming more successful in each book. His role in Monstrous Regiment, although little more than a cameo, shows Vimes in a fully diplomatic role. In The Fifth Elephant, Lady Ramkin was a helpful presence, lending him her lifetime of experience with the nobility; in Monstrous Regiment, she is back in Ankh-Morpork with their infant son. He is no longer dependent on anyone's help to navigate the political sphere.
The satiric comments Vimes gets to make are real observations of the human condition, and Vimes is a character of real importance. Bettelheim might have been referring to Samuel Vimes when he wrote:
Psychoanalysis was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. Freud's prescription is that only by struggling against what seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence. (8)
Vimes never stops struggling against injustice. His example carries a vital truth at its heart, and the City Watch novels succeed admirably in illuminating the pitfalls we as citizens must avoid. The message is of hope and of change, even though the times seem dark.
Of course, Sam Vimes is a fiction. If perhaps it is a little impractical to emulate a man who does not exist as flesh and bone, it would be pointless to deny anyone an ethical hero in a world where such can seem terribly scarce. If a human being adheres to a high standard of ethical behavior, it is unseemly to ask the source of that moral code. Despite human weaknesses that, besides making characters like himself and Granny Weatherwax more interesting to write, make him seem very real, Vimes is an ethical man; as long as readers remember that stories are maps rather than the terrain itself, it hardly matters whether role models live next door, on another planet, or universes away and centuries removed.
Pratchett's satire is witty, but it carries a powerful message of decency which grows from the lighter jokes of the first books to the character-driven comedy of the later novels. Satire is as old as western civilization; from Juvenal and Horace, to Swift and Pratchett, writers have used it to examine how human beings treat one another. The City Watch stories exhibit a consistent ethical system, most artfully framed. Michel de Certeau writes that "ethics … defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. This distance designates a space where we have something to do" (199). Vimes exists in this space, choosing, time and again, that which is right over that which is easy. Even Dean Swift couldn't have done it better.
The Discworld is a fantastic place; Vimes, too, is only one writer's fancy. Yet it is hard not to feel that here may be the sort of dream that could lead one to great truths—truths beyond mere reality.
Alden, Raymond MacDonald. The Rise of Formal Satire in England under Classical Influence. Philadelphia: Archon Books, 1961.
Certeau, Michel de. "History: Science and Fiction." Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 17. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1986.
James, Edward. "The City Watch." Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature. Ed. Edward James Andrew Butler, Farah Mendlesohn. Reading, United Kingdom: The Science Fiction Foundation, 2000.
Jones, Diana Wynne. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. London: Vista, 1996.
Pratchett, Terry. "Cult Classic." Meditations on Middle-Earth. Ed. Karen Haber. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2002.
---. The Fifth Elephant. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
---. Guards! Guards! New York: HarperTorch-HarperCollins, 1989.
---. Jingo. New York: HarperCollins-HarperPrism, 1997.
---. Men at Arms. New York: HarperPrism-HarperCollins, 1993.
---. Night Watch. London: Doubleday, 2002.
Rose, Margaret. Parody//Meta-Fiction. London: Croom Helm, 1979
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