Wave 1

As Genly Ai continues to live on, Gethen, the planet he once called Winter, he has a hard time seeing the Gethenians as they see themselves. For one, the Gethenians don’t have a gender up until their time of kemmer. As a human this is hard for Genly to grasp, mainly because on earth we say “he, she, him, her” opposed to the Gethenians who call everyone “he”. When Genly was talking to Estraven he was thinking how “it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence [...] and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness” (pg 12). He seems as confused as we probably all are just because this isn’t life as we know it. Although Genly may be confused he is willing to learn about how the Gethenians live their life by reading up on their culture, as well as actually living among them. He stated in chapter one that he feels “[...] alone, with a stranger, inside the walls of a dark place, in a strange snow-changed city, in the heart of the Ice Age of an alien world”, even though he has been living on this planet for two years now, no matter how long he has been on Gethen, Genly still feels like an outsider. This is understandable, being that he is from earth, and how different the two worlds are from each other.