Must There Be A Jon Snow?

More spoilers for 'A Dance With Dragons.' Lots of them. Do not read this post if you didn't read the book and want to.

It gives me no pleasure to contradict my friend Alyssa Rosenberg, but she's way off the mark in her assessment of Jon Snow. But she's off in a way that reflects well on her character, reflects badly on mine, and highlights why structuralists love 'A Song of Ice and Fire.'

Alyssa considers Jon a "nation builder," who "does more to reconceptualize what Westeros should be than any of the five kings he’s stayed neutral from." She means, of course, Jon allowing the Wildlings into the Realm and even into the Night's Watch. That's, to her, an "astonishing act of political and moral vision." And this, I submit, is why the liberalism of sentiment is doomed to fail.

First, Alyssa ignores the expediency of what Jon did. The central strategic fact of the Night's Watch is its decline. Bereft of men, it can barely hold three posts along the wall. Sworn Brothers just fragged the Old Bear. And it would probably have fallen to Mance Rayder had Stannis not ridden to the rescue. There's a reading in which Jon's acts display "political and moral vision." But there's a far more compelling reading -- bolstered, textually, by his point-of-view explanations to himself -- in which Jon's acts display expediency. With the White Walkers and the Wights afoot, the Night's Watch needs soldiers. Jon gives it soldiers -- even young boys and girls. What Jon does, he does for the Watch, not the Realm. 

Nor does Jon display any interest in building a nation. The Wildlings don't get integrated into the North. They get a ghetto in the Gift, in which they're dependent on the Night's Watch. Jon strolls his Brothers into the Gift to hand out what provisions he can spare -- and while he does so, he makes a pitch for the Wildlings to join their old enemies in the Watch. This is not "act[ing] towards a comprehensive vision of a new world." Look at it from the Wildlings' perspective: serve, or you don't eat. I suppose this is a kind of nation building: the kind that, in practice, fails. Alyssa needs to add a sense of hubris to her sense of tragedy. 

Alyssa finds Jon's redefinitions of the Realm admirable. Others might call Jon a usurper. He's not a king. He's a controversial, compromise choice for Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. The Night's Watch is a brotherhood of guardsmen. Its job, as understood by anyone south of the Wall, is to keep the Wildlings out of Westeros. And what did Jon just do? More importantly, by what right did he do it?

We learn from Jon's time with Mance that the Wildlings are hardly monsters. They're just as admirable, dishonorable and human as anyone in Westeros. Once that's clear, it engenders an obvious sense of abitrariness and injustice in anyone considering the role of the Watch. But for better or for worse, that's the role of the Watch. For a Lord Commander to arbitrarily decide to rewrite that role smacks of dereliction of duty. It's for a King to redefine the realm, not a Lord Commander. You can't run a military if its top officer looks at his/her central task and decides, naahhh, we're gonna do it this way now. 

Perhaps even more problematic is the incompetence Jon displays in his redefinition of the Night's Watch. He imposes radical change on his Sworn Brothers -- many if not most of whom did not vote for him -- without ever preparing them for what he does. Alyssa is being rather generous when she says Jon "stays neutral" from five kings. He garrisons Stannis, Selyse and that freaky monotheist priestess on the Wall, and lets them stay there. No one who doesn't have the privilege, as we do, of reading Jon's mind would view that as an act of neutrality. He ends ADWD by essentially aiding Stannis in a campaign to take Winterfell. To the average Sworn Brother, an accidental commander is turning the Night's Watch into an instrument of his own agenda, forsaking its most sacred obligations and traditions, and acting like Lord Stark, not Lord Snow. You would stab the guy, too!

We get to know that Jon's doing what he does for the good of the Watch and the Realm. The Walkers are out there, and only Jon sees that they're the real threat, not the Wildlings. Drastic times, drastic measures -- even if, as Aemon warned, Jon is also conflicted about his duties to Winterfell.

But there's a lesson in the stabbing of Jon Snow. (No one really thinks he's dead, right?) The Realm, like the world, is made of institutions. If you wish to change the realm, you have to engage in the painful, arduous task of building legitimacy through these recognized institutions so that your changes don't inspire the backlash that undoes them all. One of the strengths of George R.R. Martin is that he's brutally consistent here. The same hubris that runs through Cersei when she cynically reconstitutes a group of religious warriors runs through Jon and Dany when they admirably attempt to focus on the White Walkers or banish slavery from Meereen. As a wise woman once exclaimed in a different story, "It's Baltimore, Cedric!"

Put it this way. I predict that history will consider one of the Obama administration's wisest acts to be the way in which it abolished Don't Ask Don't Tell. For someone who really wanted to see that bigoted and unjust policy go away, it was occasionally agonizing to watch Obama decline to stretch his executive authority to the maximum and impose a really big change on the military during wartime. He would have been entirely within his legal rights to do so. But Obama, Bob Gates and Adm. Mullen recognized that unless they created a sense of buy-in amongst service personnel, a backlash was a real possibility. Its victims would be gay servicemembers, not outsiders -- precisely the people that abolishing DADT is supposed to protect.

So for a painfully slow year, DADT repeal went through a process of soliciting servicemember views, a craven political theater in which the service chiefs (minus Adm. Roughead) voiced their reservations, a successful congressional vote and now final certification. The early consequence? The Marines, the service most resistant to abolishing DADT, are leading from the top in training leathernecks to accept a post-DADT era. You know nothing, Jon Snow. 

*Headline is referencing this. If you don't know, now you know.

Comments

[Josh Winslow]

One other thing I noticed on my last reread was how bad nearly every character is at thinking out the logical outcomes of their decisions. Catelyn flies south instead of sending a messenger and leaves Winterfell without any adult Starks (do you think she would have sent the entire garrison off to deal with the Iron Born or let Bolton's bastard get away with killing his wife?). Robb lets his hormones get in the way. Eddard utterly fails to understand how power works and did nothing to protect his family. Cersi makes bad decision after bad decision. I could go on, but the main thing I got out of the series on this last read is how badly aristocracy (with hereditary passing of power) works.

Littlefinger, Varys and Tyrion, some of the only capable men in Westernos have to struggle and fight to run things whereas lack-wits like the Starks are able to throw away tons of blood and treasure due mainly to their place in the feudal hierarchy.

[Ryan Bonneville]

@Josh - Which, of course, is why Stannis should be king. He's the only contender (and the only non-Jon Snow character) who actually has his eye on the ball.

[Crow]

It would serve Martin well to have Stannis survive all this and end up being king. No one likes him, barely anyone follows him, his claim to the crown is tenuous, and that's if you're being nice. This would all match up with Martin's deconstruction of the epic hero narrative, where the happy ending we're all hoping for (Jon Snow and Daenerys save the bloody world with dragons, get married, rule Westeros and have like twenty babies) flat out ISN'T the ending we can expect from history.

To answer the question of "Must there be a Jon Snow?" I admit that Jon dying or failing because he makes a series of badly-informed decisions would match with the pattern of Ned, Catelyn, Jon Connington, Cersei... and, well, pretty much anyone who ever made a plan that didn't work, which is pretty much everyone who ever made a PLAN. But as a writer, as some point you have to step back from indicting the tropes of the field you're writing in and allow a little bit of heroism to peek it's way through all the darkness.

Jon Snow must survive and eventually succeed because for him to fail is to damn the idea that anyone should attempt to do what's right for the world, instead of what's right for themselves.

[Doctor Memory]

Crow: I'm willing to believe that ONE of the deaths at the end of ADwD are fake-outs, but not BOTH. Between the demonstrated ability of the Red God's priests to occasionally resurrect people and the drawn-out prologue chapter that established that skinchangers can resurrect themselves, I think we can safely expect Jon to survive his temporary case of steel poisoning. Ergo, Stannis is dead.

[Attackerman]

Great comments, everybody.

@Crow, @doctormemory, my guess is that neither Stannis nor Jon is dead. GRRM's gotten reaaaaaally lazy about making us think his characters are dead: Brienne, Sandor, Tyrion, Bran, Theon, Asha... who am I forgetting? (Zombie Catelyn, Zombie Ser Beric and Zombie Ser Gregor are kind of a separate category.)

[Doctor Memory]

And by the way: I pretty much agree on all counts. The two great themes of ASoIaF are "living in the middle ages basically sucked" and "leadership is hard." In the latter category we have, well, basically every male Stark of adult age. Jon, much like Cersei, convinced himself that acting like a badass was more important than actually watching his flank. Jon's motivations were "better," but what of it? Practically his first act as Lord Commander was to make a point of alienating and distancing his friends and supporters, and he followed that up by repeatedly pissing in the faces of people who were potentially friends but also potentially enemies. No shock how it worked out.

[Leinad]

@spencerman: You forgot Davos.

(But at least Syrio is dead.)

And I wouldn't take anything in Ramsay's letter without a cubic foot of pure NaCl - it's a clear attempt to provoke Jon and it stinks of desperation.

[Taylor]

@Ryan: I agree that of the realistic contenders Stannis would probably be the best king, at least if it comes down to a choice between him and Dany. Ignoring the threat of a Targaryen invasion from across the narrow sea, the two main threats facing Westeros are
1.) Deterring of defeating an invasion by the Others we have clear reason to believe is coming, and
2.) Somehow managing to feed the population of the Riverlands that don't have the resources to survive a long winter.
Despite the two Targaryen's successes, neither Dany or Aegon have any real experience governing. Dany's tenure in Meereen was generally unsuccessful, and there's little reason to believe that she has the political and more important administration skills to ensure that the Seven Kingdoms' most populous regions don't starve on a massive scale in the coming winter. Administration capabilities were Ser Kevan's strong points, but of course he's an asset that isn't available to the Iron Throne anymore. I'm feeling more and more that GRRM is setting up for a Targaryen restoration -- it certainly seems like the narrative is becoming more and more assertive in suggesting that a Targaryen, not a (nominal!) Baratheon, is the rightful heir to the throne -- but I have trouble recognizing Dany as a capable governor rather than just the recipient of amazingly good luck.
Of course Dany's dragons would be a game-changing asset in a war with the Others, but I still don't see a Targaryen restoration as good for Westeros in the long term.

On a more practical level I can't see Jon dying simply because he's the only narrator that's consistently on the wall. From a story mechanics perspective, he's difficult to replace.

[sheenyglass]

"You can't run a military if its top officer looks at his/her central task and decides, naahhh, we're gonna do it this way now."

Except Jon's decision was based on his realization that the purpose of the Watch was to protect men against the Others. The watch's view that their role was to fight the wildings was an erroneous view of their institution. By sympathizing with the Wildings Jon was able to see that they were men, entitled to the protection of the Watch.

In that sense Jon is working explicitly withing the framework of the institution, but the "true" institution of its origins. He is stabbed by the adherents to the contemporary view of the institution. So he is simultaneously revolutionary--in that he views wildings as fellow men--and reactionary; he views the the Watch in the same way an originalist views the constitution.

[Attackerman]

@sheenyglass: Perhaps it was an erroneous view. But it was unquestionably *the Watch's* view. Jon redefined its mission -- for a goal I think everyone can agree is worthy, but nevertheless a redefinition. And he never prepared his Brothers for such a drastic change.

[justin bieber shoes]

i went to the same school as patrick. i remeber those girls from my school who wrote in. they were white trash...i always felt so bad for them.

[Shop Hermes Bags]

Don't know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one

[moncler outlets]

Nice, and thanks for sharing this info with us.Good Luck!

[Mom of Toddlers]

This is my favorite show too!

[Varys' Balls]

Jon Snow for president!!! Would he be a democrat or republican? Labour or Tory? Fianna Fail or Fine Gael??!!!!!

[Chaussure Jordan]

Absolument. Parfois, le meilleur exercice de l'écriture pour moi est d'écrire un blog de ​​mémoire - il desserre les articulations, pour ainsi dire. Je ferais bien de s'en souvenir plus souvent ...

[cheap jordan retro]

I suggest adding a "+ Google" button for the blog!

[Over50Website]

Jon's actions may have been expedient, but I don't see that he had a lot of choices. He has already demonstrated that he is resourceful, and he is the LORD - doing a much better job that those awful Bolton's etc. of actually caring for the small folk (the majority of people.). Anyway, this series is awfully addictive, and I cannot believe I just finished DWD and am having withdrawals. http://www.over50web.net/personal-growth/books/will-game-of-thrones-ruin-your-life/

[http://www.airjordan8viii.com/]

Air jordanCo is one of the largest consumer products company in the Indian market. Like a soft drink company they have been operating in India since 1989 and have since that time expanded into what they're today, supplying the Indian market with some of the best variety of products within the food market.Air jordan have been an aerated drink favourite between the youth for a lot of generations and in many different cultures. In fact youngsters all over the air jordan retro 8 world have become up with this brand as being a big part of all their lives. One never needs a reason to seize a bottle. Maybe it's a party, dinner at a friend or even pizza night in your own home ?this bottle of fizz just had to be there. Each day would just seem so incomplete without them. This is actually the kind of attachment the youth of most cultures have for this aerated drink.Even thought air jordan happens to be a hot favourite using the youth, the Indian campaign of eh hai youngistaan meri jaan?has showed success for the first time. Not only is this beverage part of everyday life for the youth of India, but it's additionally a style icon with the youth in the country. The very fact of the matter is that the launch from the youngistaan campaign makes sure that it brings the youth even nearer to the brand which makes it more popular than even.

Like a soft drink brand it's now become just too large which is very well loved that you will now view it as part of any major event in the united states. When the brand isn't directly connected to the event under consideration you will find it pledging its support through various campaigns and television commercials. This provides the Jordan Fly23 Max company a stronger sense of identity with the public in particular. All of this only scores brownie points with the masses as they begin to see the brand as you with themselves.Charles Dickens is specialist on paper. He's written many articles related to several industry his writing skills reflect the end result of exposure now he's researching on air jordan Soft Drink and air jordan The sport he has find more interesting fact associated with Ranbir air jordan.The days when air jordan used to merely be an aerated drink are far behind. This popular cola drink in the cola giant air jordanCo has evolved into a symbol, an icon of young India. That coffee actually comes with an identity that individuals can relate too.

Air jordan began since many other brands do, with regular celebrity endorsements from some of the favourite celebrities in Bollywood as well as on the cricketing scene. These endorsements helped the company get popular and increased its share of the market tremendously. Some of the well known faces that have backed this brand include Shahrukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, Kareena Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Ranbir Kapoor, MS Dhoni and many more. Many of these faces have had a really significant impact on the youth of India and for that reason they served as ideal brand ambassadors.Air jordan is among the only aerated drinks in the Jordan Silver Anniversary united states that seems to back almost every major event in the united states. The industry it seems to be the obvious was cricket. The drink has almost always been a major if not a title sponsor out of all major cricketing events in the united states. That coffee uses this sport as leverage and it shows support even through television commercials etc. The very best example of this would be the en in blue?commercial over the last World Cup. Each time there is an international cricket tournament, the company brings about an advertisement to pledge their support to India.

[ed hardy uk]

bir air jordan.The days when air jordan used to merely be an aerated drink are far behind. This popular cola drink in the cola giant air jordanCo has evolved into a symbol, an icon of young India. That coffee actually comes with an identity that individuals can relate to

[buy cheap air jordan shoes online]

jordans Dunks SB shares a sizable reveal in the professional skateboarding shoe market place now. People presently realize jordans just like a significant supplier of trainers for basketball and skate boarding specially. Professional skateboarding was in the beginning regarded as a slight neighborhood for shoe makers. Gradually within the late 80's skate boarding was uncovered just like a significant booming industry wherever primary shoe companies started taking portion.

air jordan dunk SB can be a shoe devised for professional skateboarding mainly. This shoe brand can help the potential buyers to find the perfect pair of sporting activities use they would like to keep for by themselves. Basically, basketball and professional skateboarding sneakers have a very lot in keeping. The happy couple of those sporting activities require robust grips and sturdy power for your sport play. Players of those two these games will need to indicate large possible with stamina and enormous offense. For sudden motion, air jordan dunk SB proves perfect because it has double stitched edges and huge high quality leather so as not to let the believers feel down. Apart from these, jordans shoes offer long-lasting ankle support as perfectly as relative comfort and ease.

jordans sneakers have zoom air sole and inflated tongues so as to decrease the strain of ft and provide more comfort. In addition they include soles with sticky grip in order to enhance the board to foot interaction. The sporty glimpse may be the trend statement of existing generation. The environment jordan dunk underwent a whole new search when re released in 1998. The dunk SB was popularized with the aid of multi colored style and smooth appears to be. Previously prevalent in canvas, the current styling of jordans dunks are available in suede, cracked leather and black plait.

The soundness and lower profile sole of jordans dunks SB is exactly what enhances the grounded functionality of sports guys and for that reason can make it preferred. Previously the dunk SB was readily available in canvas form. This design became infamous following a fashion and can necessity of everyone transformed. This solution was re released by jordans with a totally various make about. This time around it had leather soles and puffy tongues. The brand new improved jordans dunk looked much more attractive and efficient.

http://www.buyairjordanretroshoes.org

[Retro Jordans]

Retro Jordans ONLINE SALE IN THIS WEB