Le Guin offers her readers characters motivated by intellectual curiosity, humanism, and self-determination, a nonviolent, nonexploitative philosophy capable of encompassing the unknown and complex cultures in relation to one another. In the end, her characters stand for no one, no concrete meaning they simply are. Once made, these discoveries allow her characters to be integrated into themselves and their worlds. Along the way, Le Guin demands that they learn the paradoxes inherent in life, the ambiguous nature of creation, and the interrelatedness of all that seems to be opposed. Frequently using a journey motif, Le Guin sends her characters in search of shadows, rings, theories, or new worlds-all of which are metaphors for undiscovered elements of the self. The worlds Le Guin creates are authentic in a profoundly moral sense as her characters come to experience truth in falsehood, return in separation, unity in variety. Her subject is always humankind and, by extension, the human environment, since humanity cannot survive in a vacuum her technique is descriptive, and her mode is metaphoric. Few other contemporary authors have described this process with the force and clarity of Le Guin. Le Guin (Octo– January 22, 2018) has Genly Ai state in The Left Hand of Darkness that “truth is a matter of the imagination,” she is indirectly summarizing the essential focus of her fiction: explorations of the ambiguous nature of truth through imaginative means.
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