The past chapters were extremely long and also was not easy to understand.
In the beginning, King Argaven was very unsure of Estraven and seemed to not trust him at all. later on, it was revealed why King Argaven had thought of Estraven as a traitor, Estraven wanted to share/give land? to its neighboring countries to avoid war, but Argaven was against it and sent him to leave.

In a class discussion this week, I can't recall what chapter, but the question of Estraven being a traitor (or not) came up. I personally don't believe that Estraven is a traitor and I disagree with King Argaven for thinking that he had committed treason. Estraven only wanted peace, and he thought that by sharing/giving territory to their neighboring countries, will help prevent war. But Argaven thought differently. He thought that Estraven was betraying him by wanting to give land and totally missed his whole point of sharing land to prevent war.

Since Estraven was exiled from Gethen, which i just found out was aka Winter -_-, he traveled around, just like Genly (how ironic!), and kept a diary of the place he stayed in. This chapter, the chapter of Estraven's journal entries, confused me a lot. But after having group discussions, it was clarified that it WAS Estraven narrating, and it was him writing in his journal.

Today was an inetersting discussion. The group i was in had discussed the parallelism of the Commensal to communsim and King Argaven and Tibe's control, as monarchy ruling. The Commensals left out information from their citizenz, kind of like the Communsists, in means of "protecting" them.