Seeming nonsense in Ch. 8?
I’ve been enjoying the novel so far, but in chapter 8 (“summon the eight missing players”) I’m seeing what appears to be absolutely nonsense reasoning from many people including Chen Ran.
The whole thing where they’re “deducing” and “concluding” that the marriage must be broken because of the torn photograph, or that there must be a second child, all the way up to saying that the second kid must have died or gotten lost etc… On its face, this kind of vague associative reasoning doesn’t work. Whoever made the chamber might have just torn off the edge of the page, they have no idea that it’s even a “half”. The girl might not be the man’s daughter. Might be a family friend, for one of many alternative explanations. Etc etc.
I can imagine how this might not be nonsense: maybe these veteran players have learned from experience that this kind of reasoning works in the context of these puzzles, and maybe Chen Ran has deduced that if they were really so stupid as to make these kinds of mistakes they wouldn’t have survived long enough to be veterans, so they must be following a learned contextual logic, and is hence following that logic himself. But really these logical leaps should be considered “common sense lies”, I would have thought.
Can someone tell me if this is the author being dumb or not? I’d read on if there’s some explanation for this, even if it’s just “the characters are dumb right now and this is intentional by the author and they will get smarter later”.