Hey guys, are you Able to provide me with some feedback for this paragraph about chapter 1 in the Lefthand of Darkness about alienation?
Thank you
Alienation Paragraph from Chapter 1:
The idea of alienation is prevalent throughout chapter one. Exemplified through the narrator, Genly Ai, he expresses his severe frustration in attempting to apprehend the foreign city of Karhide, located in Gethen. Genly is not able to progress with his mission as he is not able to “trust Estraven whose motives are forever obscure” to him, despite Estraven being the “only person on Gethen” who “trusted” him, signifying the disparate social constructs that exist between Gethen and Genly’s homeland of Terra. Ultimately, this demonstrates the reasoning behind Genly not being able to comprehend Estraven as the former bears his own fixed pre-conceptions from Terra such as the notion of gender. Genly derives from a place where an individual has a fixed gender, whereas on Gethen, the individuals are androgynous and thus Genly’s “efforts took the form of…forcing” people like Estraven “into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential” to his “own.” Consequently, he is not able to understand the social ethos of Gethen. The notion of self-inflicted isolation is a consequence of one being closed-minded to a new set of social constructs.