Sunday, January 21, 2018

Genly Ai’s Struggle

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai is an alien from another planet who has been sent to the planet of Gethen.  While he’s there, he has a difficult time adapting to the Gethenians way of living because they are genderless.  Their relationships with one another are also different in that Gethenians go into what’s called “Kemmer” with each other.  Only during Kemmer is when Gethenians have specific genders due to their dominance or comfort with each other.  Ai constantly refers to all Gethenians as “he” or “him”, based on how he perceives the way they look or appear to him.  His actions and attitude towards understanding them reveals that the world he comes from is similar to ours in that everyone is born either a male or female and have relationships with one another as we do.  The world he comes from is most likely very specific to how a male and female should look and behave since he always makes the mistake of referring to all Gethenians males.

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3 comments:

  1. Brooke SasseFebruary 2, 2018 at 11:51 AM

    I agree with you that Genly struggles to see the Gethenians as gender neutral people because of behaviors he as always associated with being "male or female". I also find it interesting how, like you mentioned, he has a hard time adapting to their way of life, but I think Gethenians much the same struggle to understand Genly. In one chapter they sort of hint at their feelings towards Genly being a "pervert" because he remains a male all of the time which is strange to the people on Gethen. I think the aspect of not understanding each other is a mutual feeling throughout the book.

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  2. UnknownFebruary 5, 2018 at 10:32 AM

    this statement you wrote is very well written, and your over all idea of the genders was great. i agree with your statement
    about associating behavior with gender.

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  3. UnknownFebruary 6, 2018 at 6:09 PM

    Wow! I think your point of view is really interesting! What I seemed to notice is that Genly struggles with comparing the people of Gethen to the people from where he is from. For example in one of the chapters where Genly is acting like a "man" all rough and strong, Estraven has no idea what was going on. I feel as though Genly in a way assumes when someone is male or female based on what he knows.

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