What a sweet opiate.

I greatly enjoyed floating through the rotting river Gyoll, the cold swamp and the oubliettes for days, much like Severian in the Botanic Gardens. All these visions you see like shadows in the back of your mind, filtered through a small pinhole, letting in just enough light. This is because you never leave Severian's head. With some novels, like Lord of Light, it seems as if you can look around, and if you really wanted to, you could stop the trolley and stroll through its world. No such thing is possible here. You are the blind antiquarian in the basement, you are Severian hearing Thecla's stories, you are Thecla hearing the world through her cell.

Any high action or excitement gets filtered through Severian's depressive mind. Feel free to play puzzles with Severian as an "unreliable" narrator, but I think this mistakenly presupposes some objective reality that Severian is trying to describe, and no such thing exists. This all gives the book the sense of a dream.