Ascending - Comedy

Comedy

The protagonist and first-person narrator of Expendable is Festina Ramos; Oar is a secondary character who provides much of the comic relief in what is an entertaining but essentially serious novel. In Ascending the relationship is reversed: Oar is the first-person narrator while Festina plays an important but secondary role. As a result, Ascending is an overtly comic novel in a way that Expendable is not—though with a serious and even grim subtext.

The comic tone is established from the start. The opening chapter, which is titled "Wherein I Am Not Dead After All," begins this way:

This is my story, the story of Oar. It is a wonderful story. I was in another story once,

but it was not so wonderful, as I died in the end. That was very most sad indeed.

But it turns out I am not such a one as stays dead forever, especially when I only

fell eighty floors to the pavement.

(On his website, Gardner writes, "I think Oar is the funniest character I've ever written. She's a hoot." Gardner knows his work better than anyone.)

Oar participates deeply in two fundamental comic archetypes, the Fish Out of Water and the Wise Simpleton. Oar, in fact, was a fish out of water on her own planet, Melaquin; she was the last ambulatory and conscious individual on a planet of sleepers. Once she gets into outer space, among alien species (richly imagined and lushly described), her place beyond the fringe of the everyone else's mental outlook is even more extreme.

With a genetically-enhanced intelligence but the emotional maturity of a spoiled child, Oar fits into the category of Wise Simpleton, a hallmark of fairy tales and children's stories: the youngest child in the family, the humblest member of the group, who incongruously turns out to solve the key problem, resolve the plot, save the day. This combination of elements allows Gardner to craft a story and a prose style in which some of the more outrageous statements ever penned in the English language ("It seems humans have a foolish taboo against setting infants on fire") make perfect sense.