TLDR: The point of Brienne's story arc is:
- to tell the kind of knightly quest story like the stories GRRM read as a youngster(Ivanhoe, Howard Pyle)
- to turn the whole idea of the Quest on it's head
- the explore the theme of oaths and their inhuman demands on human beings
- to ruminate on the effects of a brutal war on the civilian populace
- to wrap up certain loose ends
- to give world-building depth to Westeros
- to introduce Ser Shadrich to readers and so that we readers know he's working for Varys when he reappears in Sansa's narrative(self-explanator
y)
A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are different books: but they were written originally to be one book, called A Dance with Dragons.
Technical problems while writing and the stories ever-growing length caused the publishing company and George RR Martin to split the story into two books. But together, they form a whole tapestry that is thematically and aesthetically coherent. If a bit of a pain in the behind to read together(e-books make all this easier).
If you look at A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons as one book together,as GRRM clear patterns emerge.
- You have three 'ruler narratives': Jon Snow, Daenerys and Cersei. In all three, the point of view character struggles with the realities of rulership and brings to bear on it all the resources they have at their disposal; and their hang-ups end up defining their rulership. All of them are, in the end, brought down by forces greater than they, by events that they themselves have set in motion.
- You have three 'pupil' narratives: Arya, Sansa and Bran. All three are hidden away in their various cocoons: Bran in the dark cave of the Greenseers; Arya in the House of Black of White; Sansa in the cold marble halls of the eyrie. All of them have 'teachers' whose intentions are murky and seem, at best, morally ambiguous and at worst, psychopathic and dangerous.
And we have three travel narratives: Tyrion, Jaime, and Brienne (also Samwell, but his narrative doesn't fit with the others so well--it seems rather like a mixture of 'travel' and 'pupil' narratives.)
All of these travel narratives involve a progression through various locales in a way that seems meandering and pointless. Meandering they may be. Pointless, they are not.
Though, obviously, your mileage may vary.
Jaime's tour around the Riverlands, sorting out the jagged shards of the war with distaste and self-disgust; wracked with doubt and shattered by the shocks of the last year or so: prison, dismemberment, the death of his father, the revelation that Cersei's cheated on him.
While he attempts to bring the Riverlands to order in a way that satisfies his yearning to restore the long-lost honor of his idealistic youth, he puts the pieces of his own shocked psyche together...finally coming to the realization that the central pillar of the old Jaime's life , his love for his sister is gone...and he no longer loves his sister the Queen.
art by Nick Kaliminn
There's also Tyrion, who, shuffled along against his will by the machinations of Varys and Illyrio, then captured by Jorah Mormont; then enslaved, descends to the depths of despair and self-loathing and hatred for just about everything until his final enlistment in the Second Sons sellsword company and what seems like a revival of the energetic, clever Imp of A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings.
art by Lukasz Jakolski
And finally there's Brienne. I loved reading Brienne's chapters in A Feast For Crows. I like the way GRRM tells stories.
But not everyone does.
But not everyone does.
Brienne's journey is different from Jaime and Tyrion's.
The Knightly Quest
Brienne's not on a jouney to find herself. She's on a quest. A quest to find Sansa Stark 'to keep her safe' and therefore fulfill the oath she made to the dying Catelyn Stark. And it's an exercise in utter futility.
The idea of a quest, so prevalent in the fantasy genre, is something that is largely missing in A Clash of Kings.
You have Bran's journey to find the Three-Eyed Crow. And Brienne. Both of them are very different. Bran's quest is much more high fantasy, post-Tolkien, magical, atmospheric.
Brienne's is not. Brienne's quest is pre-Tolkien. Read Sir Thomas Malory. Or better yet, read the The Story of King Arthur and his Knights by the American author and illustrator Howard Pyle.
From Grrm's Notablog: Reading Recommendations
Thomas B. Costain (THE BLACK ROSE, THE SILVER CHALICE) is another writer worth checking out, along with Howard Pyle, Frank Yerby, Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Now the book above, along with other books by Howard Pyle are actually public domain. They are over a hundred years old. Next to free if you have a Kindle.
I remember reading them in high school as my high school library had copies of all them. I enjoyed them; the entire arch of the Arthurian Saga is a beautiful and tragic story that's inspired centuries of retellings...but I gotta tell you. Some of those knights' quests...it's not that they are pointless. They aren't. The noble knight ends up defeating the evil monster or Black Knight who's been terrorizing the country; and he ends up marrying the damsel the Black Knight is holding.
But man, do they get tedious sometimes. Just...pointless fight after pointless fight. After pointless fight. Good illustrations, though.
There's a whiff of Howard Pyle's stories wafting about Brienne's quest that I can't quite put my finger on, other than the pointless bits of adventure that she has in her wanderings. Of course they are written for a different audience and George RR Martin is a MUCH MUCH better writer.
But it's more than that.
I think that GRRM is turning the whole idea of the Knightly Quest in general on its head.
Here we have Brienne: earnest, guile-less, honorable to fault, the 'perfect knight' (who's not actually a knight), good-hearted, strong...a hero in any other book...failing miserably in her quest to find Sansa. And the readers, knowing where she is are screaming at her 'We know where she is!" It's frustrating. And funny.
She gets to Saltpans days after Arya's left. Right as she's about to travel to the Vale(where Sansa is) she learns of Lysa's death and immediately goes somewhere else. All her earnestness and goodness does nothing to help her.
When Brienne journey to the Whispers proves futile, GRRM is simply post-modernizing the Quest trope. In much the same way that Joe Abercrombie did with the magic quest in 2007's Before They Are Hanged. It's point is in it's very pointlessless.
And maybe the fool she finds in the ruins of the Whispers is herself.
Love is the death of honor
Brienne has a magic sword called Oathkeeper.
But when it comes to keeping oaths, Brienne is a failure in general. She constantly makes noble oaths than fails to fulfill them. She swears her sword to Renly; she watches him die. She swears her sword to Catelyn; Catelyn dies. She swears to find Sansa and Arya; she doesn't come close...She swears to deliver Jaime in King's Landing;he's maimed in the process.
The only oath she hasn't failed at yet is her oath to kill Stannis: and I wonder, if it does end up going that way(and I'm not so sure it will), if it won't play out like it did in the show: with Brienne fulfilling her one destructive oath while failing in another constructive one.
And that sort of connects to a thematic point that GRRM hammers home in many a narrative arc: The conflict between the inhumane strictures of oaths and normal human urges. Jaime, Jon Snow, Samwells' arcs all highlight various aspects of these themes. Brienne's too. Because over the course of her arc it's apparent that her girlish crush on Renly has been transposed to her companion, Jaime Lannister. She loves him.
When she appears late in A Dance with Dragons to fetch Jaime for Lady Stoneheart it seems obvious that this love versus honor theme is going to play out in her storyline in a graphic way.
War
art by Rene Aigner
War in GRRM's tale is never the glorious adventure we see in World War Two mythology. It's pain and blood. It's muck and deep, deep sorrow at the senselessness f it all. Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, not Laurence Olivier's.
It is much more influenced by the darkness of the Vietnam War, probably the single-most significant historical event of GRRM's baby-boomer youth; Tywin's Dogs remind you of the Tiger Force. And I think the Love versus Honor theme is more than a little influenced by the hippie ethos, the anti-war protests and mass draft dodging of the 1960s.
Everywhere Brienne goes she's confronted with the aftermath of war. Strangers shun strangers; soldiers brutalize the peasants; Randyll Tarly delivers harsh justice to convicted criminals and victims a like; she sees orphans struggling to survive, hanged corpses, dead bodies. And observes it all. While Jaime traverses much of hte same landscape, and does observe some sad sights, he's dealing with too many of his own issues and dilemmas to dwell on them too much.
Brienne's a blank slate in comparison. The fact that she's got so little going on in her mind(relative to Tyrion and Jaime's, at least), the fact that she's not concerned with high politics or the Game of Thrones allows the reader to really see(and smell) the devastation wreaked by the war on the Riverlands (as well as Saltpans and Maidenpool.)
Septon Meribald's monologue about the Broken Men paints a picture of war from the peasant's point of view that is almost unique in literature as unabashedly fantasy as A Song of Ice and Fire is.
And during the journey through the ravaged land some loose ends are tied up and subplots are resolved. We learn that the Hound who's been ravaging the countryside and rumored in many story arcs is not Sandor Clegane as everyone assumes; we meet the last remnants of the Bloody Mummers at the Whispers; we find out about Sandor Clegane, another element that will reveal itself more explicitly in due time, I believe.
art by Bidonica/Pojypojy
World-building
art by Zach Graves
I sometimes think that readers give short shrift to GRRM's world-building. It's often compared negatively with the Lord of the Rings. But I don't think that's fair as I (and others) havetalked about in this post:What has a more complex lore, ASOIAF or LOTR?
I don't know what it is about Brienne's chapters. Maybe it's the lack of political ambition or the fact that she is less shattered emotionally than the other characters. But there's a sort of wonderful imagery to her chapters, a way of seeing things that the other POVs don't have. I can feel the air of the misty fells of Crackclaw Point, I can hear the sea whispering in the caves of the thousand year old ruins of the Whispers. And Nimble Dick Crabb's folklore of squishers and the legendary Ser Clarence Crabb are priceless addtitions that give depth and texture to Westeros.
I can see why some readers aren't into all this atmosphere, imagery, themes, etc.
Some readers want the tight plot first and foremost and I respect that. But I think GRRM's still telling a story with Brienne's arc and he's making a number of points. The pointlessness of it is the point, to some extent. He could have simplified it, sure. But I'm glad he didn't!
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