Wednesday, January 13, 2016
The World in Shades of Gray
Genly Ai sees the world as we see it. In his mind there's makes and females and males are the more dominant species. He's an alien in a foreign land and is having trouble adapting to the culture of the Gethinians. The easiest way to think of it is to think of him as an immigrant coming to America and trying to learn our customs. He can't just forget everything he has ever known and see the world as a Gethinian. For starters, Gethinians don't see males and females, they just see people. This seems to be one of the hardest concepts Genly has to grasp because, for him, gender is black and white but for the Gethinians it's a shade of gray. It's irrelevant in their minds. Genly's thoughts reveal that he sees the world in black and white. He is unable to interpret the world in this shade of gray. He doesn't really have anyone to lean on or confide in because he's the only one of his kind on this strange planet. It's ha d for him to adapt because he's going through this alone. No one really understands him because they don't know how he thinks. They can't learn his culture because they haven't see it firsthand the way that he's seeing there culture. Genly is an outcast in a world that will probably never understand him because they don't know anything about his culture. He's lost in a sea of people who want to understand him but can't because they're so set in their own ways.
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I agree. The people of Gethen are not very open minded when it comes to Genly and his ideas. They either don't believe him and refuse to trust him completely or suspect that his so-called mission is just a joke or prank. This makes it extremely difficult for Genly to encourage the planet to join the alliance and complete his mission.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I really like your analogy between Genly and immigrants coming to America. I think that readers sometimes forget how different Genly's world and Gethen is.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Genly's world is the world that is capable of interstellar transportation. That world was also described as the world that used to have monarchies, but that was a long time ago, so we can probably place Genly's world around the twenty-first century in real life. Gethen, on the other hand, was the world that never even went through industrialization, nor capable of mobilization for war, so unless Gethen has some weird technological advancement that would be nearly impossible in our world, they would probably be around pre-Greece/Roman era or even further. Imagine if you have to put yourself in Genly's shoe, it would probably be like if you time travel back in time to Mesopotamia and try to understand their culture.
As for the gender things. We have to consider how different Gethenian and Genly's background in order to understand why they think differently. Gethenian live their entire life seeing androgynous people where kemmer is a normal thing. Meanwhile, Genly is a fully grown adult who spends most of his lifetime familiarize himself with a society that has two genders. With this, we might be able to understand why Genly still have trouble with the concept, even though he is actively trying to get used to it for two years.