kippurbird | Eragon Summary

Well. Eldest is here. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a long ride. The book is 668 pages long.

As I'm at work, I shan't get into the book until later on this evening. However, skimming through it I have discovered a most interesting thing. There is a five page summary of Eragon before the actual story. It reads like a Previously in the Inheritance Trilogy... and I keep on imagining that TV announcer guy's voice reading it.

This I believe is an example of Paolini's immaturity as a writer. The fact that he needs to summarize the first book instead of being confident in his writing abilities to insert the necessary information into the narrative means that he hasn't developed his craft well enough. You shouldn't need to know what happened in the previous book to enjoy the second book. Yes, admittedly this is the second book in a trilogy but hundreds of trilogies have managed to do their second book without inserting a full recap of the first book in their novels.

It's not even the characters talking about or reflecting on recent/past events (something that Terry Goodkind tends to do)in the narrative but a full on recap. Doesn't Paolini think that we've read Eragon before picking up Eldest? And even if we haven't shouldn't the narrative, as mentioned earlier, be able to tell us what we need to know?

The fact that he needs to put this in, lets me know that the novel isn't starting out well at all. It tells me that the author is not trusting of his story to tell what has happened before. Which means that he doesn't trust himself to be able to tell what has happened before. If he doesn't trust his writing abilities, why should we the readers trust them?

It's something that I would expect a fan fiction writer to do, and in fact have seen them do. They write summaries of what has happened in their other fan fics to explain what will happen in the sequel. Thus reaffirm of the opinion that this story is nothing more that an overtly long fan fic in disguise.

Or on another point entirely it could be that Paolini doesn't trust his readers to know or remember what has happened before so he has to recap everything for them. It's as if the author doesn't trust his reader's intelligence (which, seeing some of Eragon's fans, I can see why) and has to spell everything out for them in large print with small words. Which also doesn't leave much confidence in the author.