Did I tell you that every scene in the series has a double or a triplet? Well, here's one of those doubles--Catelyn Two is the double of the Prologue. If we agree that the series is about the problem of the eyes, about Joyce's parallax and the ineluctable modality of the eyes, and about Plato's cave and how we perceive reality through our eyes, then George has to keep hitting that theme. Beyond the point-of-view structure, GRRM has to create doubles and triplets to cultivate our dragonfly eyes, to give us different views of the same problem--same issue, same concerns, but different characters, different setting. This is essentially George offering us a lesson in close literary reading, an early chapter, an early chance to cultivate and stretch our literary analytical muscles.

 And if you don't believe me, ask George himself--in this very chapter, the author peers out from the text and tells us to read his novel allegorically. He has Maester Luwin tell us to look through different lenses, that "there's more to this than the seeming," and how the "true message [is] concealed within." George could not make it any more explicit. This is comparable to Dante's admonition in Canto IX of the Inferno to "look beneath the veil of my verse." But in contrast to the Prologue, which ends with the Others intruding on Waymar Royce's false reality, this chapter has no such revelatory moment--we are left with the undeniable sense that something is amiss here, but with no obvious resolution to that tension.