The Box

[C.C.]

While searching fruitlessly for news of The Doors of Stone yesterday, I had an idea. What if the lockless box that Kote is trying to open contains the manuscript for Doors of Stone. Is Rothfuss telling us that he is in fact Kote and the reason the final installment has stalled is that he can't figure out how to access the end of the story? Is he trying to spread his frustration out over his readership to help him bear this burden? I fear the answer may be yes.

[Matt]

That might be a clever submeaning, but I'm sure that the box has some sort of story significance.

[Matt]

Is the box that Kote keeps in his room in the inn the same as the one that the Maer's wife had earlier on?

[Saul the Heir of Isauldur]

I think that Rothfuss is placing more questions in the books that he can answer in this series. That's not a bad thing: he's said that he'd go back to this world eventually. Tolkien did more or less the same thing in LOTR. He put several things in the books that are never really answered in the main books. Like, where did Shelob come from? Why is Mordor like that, geographically? Was the Witch King of Angmar a Numenorean? And the more intriguing ones to me personally, what lies east of Harad and Khand? What is Rhun?

Rothfuss is simply expanding the world like we do as we grow up. No one ever gets all the answers to every question they have in life. Maybe the box has a meaning in the story, maybe it's one of those things that will remain a secret, like the origin of the Warlocks or Qarth (A Song of Ice and Fire) and what the Doom of Valyria was.