It becomes clear at the very beginning of the novel that Genly has quite a difficult time understanding the people that inhabit the planet of Gethen. In the middle of the second paragraph on page 8, we see that he is not used to the environment yet. He mentions how he tries to lose himself in the crowd and is uncomfortable with how much he sticks out. The one thing he wants the most is to go unnoticed. This can be seen as a foreshadow to Genly further struggling to learn the main characteristics of Gethinians. Another early example of this is how Genly constantly assigns the Gethinians genders while he is narrating. For example, he usually calls Estraven "he", as seen in page 7. Also, when he meets Faxe, Genly refers to the character's more "feminine" traits. The reason that this is important to mention is that Gethen is a genderless society, yet Genly can't stop using gendered pronouns to refer to others.
There are plenty of examples of Genly's confusion throughout this story, but what do they mean? It seems like these moments are meant to show that Genly comes from a very different society than Gethen. While gender is non-existent on Gethen, it must play a very important role in Genly's society. Maybe it determines people's roles in his society, since he clearly tends to view certain traits as masculine or feminine. Another difference between the two societies is that Genly's is probably not a monarchy, as he is unable to reason with King Argaven in Chapter 3.
In conclusion, the reader can use Genly's lack of understanding of Gethen to determine many differences between the two societies. Structure of the government and use of gender are probably only some of the differences between them.
I agree with you James because Genly's confusion allows the reader to really dig into the differences between Genly's society (which is representative of ours) and Gethen's society (which is the point of the book's existence). By Genly being an outsider, the conversation of Gethen's society differences is brought up very often and allows the reader to fully understand how different this society works. It's a nice tactic Ursula K. Le Guin uses.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about Genly coming from a world where gender determines peoples' roles in society. Predominantly, he sees Argaven as a king and not a queen and even when he hears that Argaven is pregnant Genly still refers to him as the king. It is clear that Genly has a hard time understanding Gethen because of their lack of gender.
ReplyDeleteIts hard for Genly because he comes for a word that gender is a important role that play out on his plant. I make him feel alone when he can't have anything in common with the Gethens
ReplyDeleteBy lailah McCullough
I agree with you James because Genly come from a world that has certain standards towards men and women. Unlike the world Genly come from Gethen does not hold a certain stereotypical standard to the poeople of the planet. Therefore, Genly is forced to view all the people of Gethen to be on an equal plat form.
ReplyDeleteI'm in agreement with you; though I would like to add onto what you said. In the early chapters, we also saw the odd lack of violence. That isn't to say that there is no violence; we clearly see that murder exists. In fact, it might be common seeing as to how it is advocated by the governing body of Karhide. Rather, they completely lack the idea of war. Genly brings this up as odd. Ergo he clearly he comes from a society in which war is NORMAL.
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