The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
**Overview of "The Fifth Head of Cerberus"**
"The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is a complex narrative that unfolds over a series of eighteen sections, chronicling the life of a protagonist known as "Number Five." Set against a backdrop of privilege and dysfunction, the story begins with Number Five at the age of seven, living with his genetically dissimilar brother, David, and a robot tutor, Mr. Million, in a household marked by eerie symbolism, including a statue of Cerberus. As he navigates a tumultuous upbringing dominated by his emotionally distant father, who subjects him to disturbing interrogations and manipulation, Number Five's life transforms into a nightmarish experience.
The narrative delves into themes of identity, memory, and familial legacy, particularly as Number Five grapples with his father's cloning experiments and the cyclical nature of violence that has plagued their family. At the heart of the story is a series of criminal escapades that lead to a confrontation with a genetically altered guardian, mirroring mythological traditions. Ultimately, Number Five's journey culminates in an act of rebellion against his father's oppressive legacy, resulting in both liberation and further complexities of self-discovery.
As he inherits the family home, 666 Saltimbanque, the protagonist reflects on the themes of true identity and transformation, while navigating the complexities of relationships, including a poignant connection with Phaedria, his former love. The narrative weaves together elements of myth, memory, and the search for self amidst a backdrop of existential questions, making it a rich exploration of the human condition.
On this Page
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
First published: 1972 (in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, containing the title novella and two other stories; serial form, Orbit, 1972)
Type of work: Novella
Type of plot: Science fiction—cultural exploration
Time of work: Several hundred years in the future
Locale: The planet Sainte Croix
The Plot
In eighteen sections and about eighty pages, “Number Five,” the nickname assigned to the otherwise anonymous protagonist by his father, composes a memoir of his first thirty years. His account starts at the age of seven, when his comfortably privileged routine is disturbed. He lives with his supposed brother, David, who appears genetically dissimilar, and a robot tutor, Mr. Million. His life is transformed over the next eleven years into a sort of hell, appropriate to the family address of 666 Saltimbanque and the houses portal statue of Cerberus. His emotionally distant father conducts increasingly arduous nocturnal interrogations, eventually involving drug injections, time loss, memory loss, and hallucinatory dreams, the latter recalling the novellas epigraph from Samuel Taylor Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).
At the age of thirteen, the narrator is appointed porter or “greeter” of 666 Saltimbanque, which serves as both the family home and a brothel. This post equates him to Cerberus. At the age of eighteen, the narrator, his sweetheart, Phaedria, and David turn to petty theft among the audience of their plays to support their dramatics, then to attempted grand theft of the cashbox in the depths of a multistoried gladiatorial slave warehouse. Their descent echoes the heros into the underworld in Homers The Odyssey and Vergils The Aeneid, ancient texts that are Davids favorite reading. The cashbox, surprisingly, is guarded by a four-armed, genetically altered human, recalling Cerberus and Briareus, another guard of Tartarus in classical myth. David attacks him with a window pole tipped with a mirror shard, symbolic of viewing the world and reflected selves. The narrator attacks and kills the monster, whom he dimly recognizes as yet another clone of his father (like himself).
The narrator, emboldened by the criminal escapade and resentful of eleven years of abuse, later kills his father. That abuse culminated, he realizes during the attempted theft, in huge gaps of lost time and memory. The murder re-enacts the cycle of his fathers murder of the narrators grandfather, a replication fostered by the family patriarchs long history of cloning. Ironically, the goal of the cloning was escape from cyclicality into linear advance or evolution of humanity.
The narrator is released after a harsh nine years of imprisonment, echoing his childhood imprisonment symbolized by the iron shutters on the childrens dormitory window. He later inherits 666 Saltimbanque from his aunt, Dr. Aubrey Veil, also a clone and promulgator. Her surname is symbolic of deception and identity, as well as reflecting the theory that all the inhabitants of Sainte Croix are actually descendants of the alien aborigines of the sister planet Sainte Anne, who through chameleonic mimicry have transformed themselves into perfect human semblances.
The narrator restores 666 Saltimbanque. The name of the street, in French meaning charlatan or showman, suggests the theme of true identity. Phaedria, long since married to and divorced from someone other than the narrator, now resides in the house and appears ready for a romantic reunion with the narrator, a reunion that would include her child from her former marriage.