“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire.”
–The Lord of the Rings
So. Here we are. Quent didn’t turn back, so neither can I. Part of me wants to, though, because “The Dragontamer” will never be OK; this wound does not close. In Quentyn Martell’s final POV chapter, George R.R. Martin does nothing less than sit us down and ask us to stare directly into the sun. And so we flinch. We have to.
“The Dragontamer” is about the fire. The fire, from the Big Bang to Prometheus: the nexus of both creation and destruction, the tipping point between glory and horror, the spark of the first human thought and the embers from the last funeral pyre. The fire is the true object of Quent’s quest. His story has burned through every trope it touched upon, leaving none of the genre’s promises unbroken. By the end, he knows deep down that he will not succeed. He is not really trying to succeed, not anymore. What he’s looking for, what he descends into that dank dark dragonpit beneath the Great Pyramid to find, is an answer.
What am I doing here? Father, why?
What was it all for? What did it all mean? Why did I live? Why am I dying? I gave it all I had in me and more! I did everything the songs said, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! I lost everything, and did things for which I can never forgive myself. Father, why? Author, why? God, why? Time stops, space falls away, and our hero is left alone with the fire at the heart of Story itself. Quent meets his maker. And this is what George said to him: your story was about seeing it, knowing it, being it, the fire, just for a moment before it kills you.
When he raised his whip, he saw that the lash was burning. His hand as well. All of him, all of him was burning.
Oh, he thought. Then he began to scream.
Were I there, while Drink screamed his name and the big man roared desperately for him to turn around, all I would’ve been able to do is whisper: “Quentyn, what do you see?”
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