Everyone is mentioning the “Either Orr” symbolism of George’s name, but when I first read it, I thought of George Orwell. After that, I began to think of the novel as a dystopian/utopian text. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the author also makes a reference to a dystopian/utopian book by Aldous Huxley. On page 87, she calls the altered reality a “brave new world,” which also happens to be the title of Huxley’s book about a dystopian/utopian society. I think this a reasonable connection to make considering that a large portion of the text is preoccupied with creating a better world and failing. However, the farther into the book I got, the more I felt that my attempt to make sensible connections were a waste of energy.
I think that Le Guin intentionally makes references and symbols that don’t add up. This seems to show some deconstructionist sentiment. She uses a collage of different images, identities, and realities to create a very complex text, totally breaking down the notion of a “fixed sense of representation” (Harvey 51). Someone mentioned the various different animals that Orr is compared with. These animal comparisons are the types of symbols that don’t add up as the text progresses. In fact, she seems to take great efforts to portray each character as having multiple identities, rather than giving them a consistent identity with consistent symbols.
Her portrayal of the different characters as having multiple identities answers one of Harvey’s questions about postmodernism: “But if, as the postmodernists insist, we cannot aspire to any unified representation of the world…then how can we possibly aspire to act coherently with respect to the world?” (Harvey 52). Her answer is, we can’t. We develop fragmented identities just like the world around us. Heather is both a wife and not-a-wife. She is both black and white. She is strong, yet vulnerable. Haber describes George as “feminine or even childish” (18). Whereas Heather describes him as “the strongest person she has ever known” (96). Haber is also a contradictory character, who is often described as “benevolent,” but is also called “power hungry.” The fragmented world produces fragmented identities.
One last connection that I’d like to explore is the idea of the “center.” Le Guin’s use of “the center” confused me a little, because I remembered reading something about the center in one of Derrida’s essays. From what I remember, he said that the center was something that does not exist. We can keep deconstructing all day, but we will just come up with more double readings and never get any closer to a center or an inherent truth. Le Guin talks about a “center” for both George and Haber, but I’m not sure if it relates to Derrida in any way. She describes Haber “like an onion, slip off layer after layer of personality…no center to him” (81). George is described as “he could not be moved away from the center” (96). I’m not really sure what to make of this, or if I should even be trying to make anything of it.