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Week Ten: The Fiction of Ideas - The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuinn (# 5 points)



The story is science fiction that unfolds with the people who don’t live on Earth, but I think <The Left Hand of Darkness> tells about humans, ourselves. Many emotional exchanges take place and narratives unfold in this story. 


Ursula K. LeGuinn’s <The Left Hand of Darkness> was quite difficult to read at first. It’s a total of 20 chapters, and each chapter is a mixture of the story in first-person and in the third person. Even in the first-person story, the speaker ‘I’ is Genly Ai, and in some cases it was Estraven, so it took some time to figure out who this was. For example, ‘I’ in Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 8 is Genly Ai, but ‘I’ in Chapters 6 and 10 is Estraven. The report, written by an investigator in Ekumen’s research team, explained the characteristics of the people on the Winter planet, and helped me to understand the overall framework. 


The Gethenians in the novel have no sex. Their sex changes every 26 days. The protagonist boy Genly Ai visits Gethen alone to join the Space Union that seeks the peace of mankind, but Genly who has a man’s appearance continuously is seen as a pervert in Gethenians’ eyes. Due to the severe cold as well as cultural differences, Genly faces several difficulties. The main story of this book is thinking about how to achieve peace and communication while overcoming these difficulties. Genly himself as well, experiences confusion by encountering Gethenians. Since the Gethenians have no sex, Genly had no idea how he should treat them as a woman or a man. Furthermore, the feelings toward them were very hard to determine whether it was friendship or love. 


At the end of the story, Genly encounters an unfamiliar feeling and new confusion. He began to question the way he was in the world whether he had to share a gender. And this question is something that the readers can ask together. 


Genly Ai came to the Winter planet alone, to understand each other through a personal relationship between individuals. The story makes me think about what we have to do to understand and accept each other, who is very different and unique. 

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