Monday, March 9, 2009

From chapters 6 through 7, it was packed with a lot of information that clarified a lot of unanswered questions i had. for example, kemmering and the process of kemmering was revealed in ch7. my hypothesis was correct! Kemmering is their way of sexual contact. it was actually really weird reading it, but what was more weird was when i found out that one of the male partner morphes in and out as a female. that's different. anther fact i'd like to address is, also in ch.7, when the narrator says, "you cannot think of a Gethenian as 'it'. they are not neuters. they are potentials, or integrals."(p94), I strongly agree! but i feel that Le Guin making the male gender dominant and addressing the characters as men, in a way, contradicts the whole idea of kemmering because during kemmering one out of the two males become a FEMALE. also, the book is interesting but what makes it hard to understand and to read is Le Guin's way of writing the chapters. she doesn't always give clues to what her made up words mean, for example, shethgrythor. i still have no idea what that means.

throughout chapters 8-10 a lot of things also was revealed. like the king, argaven was pregnant and was made fun of for being old and bearing a baby. and that Estraven is not a traitor for wanting to give away land. his reasons were to prevent war and create peace, but the king totally misinterpreted it.