p. 169

S., Stenfalk, Corbeau, Pfeifer, and Ostrero rest in the cave and eat the few rations Corbeau has with her. Pfeifer talks of starting a rebellion and cleaning out the mayor’s mansions of its “immoral, materialistic rot.” S. realizes that they are all too tired to plot this rebellion and too tired to even discus The Archer’s Tales.  Pfeifer’s plan is ironic because on p. 356, S. realizes that Pfeifer becomes the exact leadership figure he had sworn to destroy.

The Archer’s Tales was a real book in the world of S., as shown in insert 20a. A novel of the same title was published in 2000, even though The Archer’s Tales mentioned here was in an article written in 1954.

Jen and Eric feel that this scene is a representation of the S. meetings, but they are unsure of who the 5th person is referring to.

This could be VMS sketching a meeting of the S. – A collective of writers thinking about how they could change the world.
So we have Ekstrom, Feurerbach, & Garcia Ferrara. Who’s the 5th person? Who’s S. standing in for?
Summersby? Or maybe S. is a metaphor for the collective itself – an entity that comprises all of them.
Sounds nice, but it doesn’t fit w/ the rest of the book.
-Entities don’t have emotions.
-Entities don’t get lonely.
-Entities aren’t trying to figure out their place in the world.

Straka was a writer. he made things up. not every detail has to be drawn directly from real life.

While they dispute the identities of these characters and Jen points out the flaws in Eric’s thought of S. representing an entity, this does give readers insight into what the S. as a whole group looks like.

From their names alone, it is possible to figure out who might represent who. Stenfalk means merlin in Swedish, Courbeau means crow in French, Ostrero means oystercatcher in Spanish, and Pfeifer means sandpiper in German, suggesting that these characters are Ekstrom, Durand, Ferrara, and Feuerbach respectively. Following the them of birds,  Straka is Czech for magpie, suggesting that S. is Straka.

Yellow-billed Magpie

It is also important to note that Eric reminds Jen and the readers that as a writer, VMS may have made everything up and that we should not forget that this is fiction.

When Eric leaves for Brazil, Jen continues to make notations. One of these is the discontinuity between the ages of Feuerbach and Ekstrom in real life and their parallel characters, Pfeifer and Stenfalk, being much younger in the novel.

Jen also writes to listen in to Ch. 8 sarcastically, but this may be representative of the number of possible VMS candidates FXC listed in the Translator’s Note and Forward.