Something many of us missed on the Fourth Floor (Spoilers through Bedlam Bride) (Trigger warning - in-depth discussion of suicide and suicidal thoughts)
I've already put up a trigger warning, but I want to state again that the contents of this post are incredibly dark, and if in-depth discussions of suicide and self harm are disturbing or harmful for you, please stop reading.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, the 988 lifeline is available throughout the United States. You can reach them by dialing 988 or via their website at https://988lifeline.org/
So there's lots of discussion about how Carl is an unreliable narrator. For those not aware, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who's character is compromised, leading to them being dishonest or hide the ball from the reader. This can come in the form of limited knowledge held by the reader but not the narrator which would change the way they interpret or tell their story, or, more interestingly, in circumstances where the narrator omits part of the telling or tells the reader a straight-up lie.
For me, the biggest example of Carl's unreliability is his refusal to explicitly discuss his mother's first suicide attempt - the one in which he was almost murdered by his mother. I think a lot of readers have picked up on this, but more have not, so I thought I'd make a write-up of it and throw it online.
This is the story carl does tell the reader, in pieces, throughout the novels: When Carl was a small child, his mother took him away from his abusive father to her parents' place in Texas. This is the time period when she took him to the circus. Eventually, Carl's father found them and forced Carl's mother to return with him to Seattle. On the way, the family stopped at the Grand Canyon. While Carl's dad waited in the car, Carl's mom brought Carl to the rim of the canyon. She told him to remember the circus, and gripped his wrist hard enough to hurt him. When he tells her that she's hurting him, she says "I know honey. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Then, she and Carl returned to the car, and the family continued on their trip. Around a decade later, Carl's mother poisoned his father in an attempted murder, and then hanged herself from a pipe in the basement, leaving a note which declared her actions a "birthday present" for Carl, who was the first to find her.
This is the story which Carl does not tell the reader: At the Grand Canyon, Carl's mom had been planning to jump, and to take him with her, rather than return to Seattle to live with their abuser.
There are a lot of breadcrumbs that can identify what almost happened there, and the fact that Carl is aware of it but finds the knowledge too disturbing to share with the reader.
The first big one happens when Carl first remembers the Grand Canyon, when he discovers the Abyss in the Iron Tangle. He has been separated from Donut and Katia, leaving him on his own for only the second time since entering the dungeon (the first time being his time with Signet). Carl sees the Abyss - which he immediately associates with the Grand Canyon.
Per the data available at https://wereintherockies.com/, there have been about 93 deaths by suicide at the grand canyon, including, famously, the ones at the end of the movie Thelma and Louise. If you've never been to the canyon, the primary visitor areas often abut steep cliffs with massive drops, and, with the Canyon being nearly 300 miles long and over a mile deep, there are unfortunately no shortage of places where it can be done.
The Abyss is, of course, the endpoint of the rail lines on the Iron Tangle, into which the trains are thrown and destroyed, much like the unfortunate individuals who have jumped into the canyon in the past. He immediately remembers the canyon incident, when his mother clenches his wrist and tells him to remember the circus. When he flashes back to reality, he is disturbed by the memory, but never expounds on why to the reader. Her reasoning for directing him to think about the circus, in case you missed it, was to put a happy memory in his mind before the end.
Later, at the finale of the novel, the Abyss features again, when Fire Brandy and Tisquick the dwarf drive the Nightmare Express into the Abyss, deciding they would rather die than return to the seasonal cycle of being NPCs on Dungeon Crawler World. When this occurs, not one paragraph later, Carl remembers his mother's second suicide attempt, in which she tried to murder his father before hanging herself. The dot connect is very clear - Carl sees Fire Brandy, a mother, drive herself and her babies into the abyss, which he already associates with the grand canyon, and then immediately remembers his own mother taking her own life, sharing this information with the reader for the very first time.
Other evidence exists in the circumstances in which Carl experiences suicidal thoughts. One example, on the Eighth Floor, when Carl almost triggers the crawl's failsafe, a clear near-miss with suicide, his mind flashes back to what his mother asked him at the rim of the canyon - "Do you remember the circus?" I'm on a reread right now, but I fully expect to see more examples of this throughout the books - particularly on the sixth floor, where Carl's feelings of loss with regards to his mother are so prominent, as well as the emergence of the concept of "the river."
As the series reaches its finale, I predict that Carl will come to a place where he can share this information directly with the reader as he finds ways to contextualize what almost happened, and finds ways to manage his own thoughts of self-harm, possibly in connection with whatever is happening with "The River."
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, the 988 lifeline is available throughout the united states. You can reach them by dialing 988 or via their website at https://988lifeline.org/