Since the publication of The Citadel of the Autarch, Wolfe has attempted to guide his reader to the interpretation of The Urth Cycle offered in the preceding section by providing a series of parallels and clues to the narrative's hidden subtexts in his subsequent fiction. Although this process began when The Book of the New Sun was still in its draft stages with the dramatisation of a simple reception theory in ‘The God and His Man’, and continued with ‘A Solar Labyrinth’, it was not until the appearance of Soldier of the Mist in 1986 that Wolfe's intentions became clear.

John Clute has already acknowledged how Wolfe's

Although Clute believes that the repetitions found in Wolfe's oeuvre represent a ‘pattern of responses to the chance of escaping from … the prison of the self’ (Strokes, p. 161), it is more judicious to argue that this pattern arises as a consequence of Wolfe's continued interest in the workings of the mind as such, and in the effects that can be gained during the reading process through the deployment of intratextual and inter-textual allusions. Taking Clute's example, it is clear from textual evidence that Severian recalls Little Tib from ‘The Eyeflash Miracles’ (1978) not only because Wolfe was having a ‘stab’ at a narrative with similar themes but also so that the habitual Wolfe reader could gain further insights into Severian's character through his similarity to Little Tib. While Severian's blindness is metaphorical where Little Tib's is literal, Wolfe uses the same intergeneric hybridisation of SF and fantasy in The Urth Cycle as he does in ‘The Eyeflash Miracles’; both narratives employ comparable mask imagery and follow the experiences of artificial messiah-figures who perform rationally explicable miracles.