The Fifth Season

Choose two to three pieces of Sanzed stonelore quoted in The Fifth Season. How does each reflect the themes of the chapter that precedes it? Of the novel as a whole?

Jemisin often uses repetition and paragraphing/lineation in ways more reminiscent of poetry than prose. At the end of Chapter 14, for example, Jemisin splits the sentence “And then the obelisk shatters” (263) across multiple lines. At the end of the Prologue, she repeats, “This is the way the world ends” (14) three time in succession (an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”). How do these stylistic choices underscore the novel’s setting, themes, etc.?

How does the revelation that Hoa is the novel’s narrator change your perception of him? How does it change your interpretation of the novel’s events?