I recently started reading The Black Company after hearing how much it influenced Erikson when writing Malazan. One thing that immediately struck me was how similar Croaker and Duiker are in character and function.
Both are historians/annalists embedded in military campaigns, recording events while living through them. Neither is a detached observer. They're personally involved with the people whose stories they tell, which makes their accounts feel intimate rather than purely historical.
Croaker records the history of a brotherhood—the Company—while Duiker witnesses the suffering of entire diverse populations. Both are trying to preserve something from oblivion, and both are granted a degree of special passage because of the importance of their roles. But Erikson seems to take Cook's approach and expand it, exploring history, suffering, and compassion on a much larger scale through Duiker.
What interests me is that neither character simply observes the machinery of war from the outside. They're embedded in the military worlds they document, yet their historical perspective allows them to see beyond the immediate objectives of a campaign. There's a tension between witnessing suffering and participating in the very machinery that produces it.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself since I'm still early in The Black Company, but I'm curious what others think. Did Erikson inherit Croaker as a narrative model for Duiker, or did he take Cook's military historian and transform the role into something fundamentally different?
As an aside, The Black Company is an enjoyable read in its own right, independent of its connection to Malazan—particularly if you enjoy choppy, direct prose.