2 ideas
A person positioned close to decisive events who declines to act is not outside history. Their inaction is one of the conditions under which those events unfold. The novel presses the question of whether Paerand's abstentions at key moments were prudence, cowardice or the only sane response a small nation's citizen had. It refuses to let him, or the reader, treat non-involvement as moral innocence.
The life reaches us only through a writer-narrator assembling one man's recollections, told out of order and years after the fact, with gaps, self-justifications and unverifiable details. Reading the story this way shifts attention from what happened to how a survivor shapes his past for a listener. It also shows how the listener's own questions and sympathies shape the record. Under a regime that controls official history, such private, fallible testimony becomes the main surviving vessel of memory.