Ursula K Le Guin, why must you hurt me so?
After everything they've been through? After all that, the arduous, life threatening, soul forging journey they made together to get to Karhide, and Estraven just dies? It seems so unfair. It's probably meant to. I am feeling so many feelings right now. It's made me sad yes, but I'm finding that I'm moved more deeply the more I think about the deeper implications. I'm struggling to word my thoughts clearly but I'll try nonetheless.
Estraven sacrifices his life for Genly, charging into the guns of the border guards. He knows that he is a threat to Genly's mission and, seeing that there is now no other choice, no other way for him to disappear, takes it upon himself to eliminate that threat. It's noble and brave and heartbreaking.
But then there's "Arek!". Estraven cries out the name of his dead brother in his mind, his final word as he dies. His brother who he (romantically) loved and swore vows to. His brother who died, how we're never quite told, but given the parallels to the folk tale of the two brothers that we're told, it very likely might have been suicide, and Estraven follows suit. It almost seems like he's trying to join him, wherever suicide victims end up in the Handdara or Yomesh religion.
Who did Estraven die for? Genly or Arek? The answer I think might be both as one.
We're confronted again by how Genly and Estraven's relationship, their love, seems unable to separate from the relationship between Estraven and his brother. Genly says, in the moments of Estraven's death, "only in a way he answered my love for him"..... and that answer is "Arek!". Even when they mindspoke for the first time, Estraven hears Genly's words in his head in his brother's voice. To Estraven intimacy with Genly is inextricable from the intimacy he had with his brother.
There's a tragic irony to it, because it's taken so long and so much development on Genly's part to see Estraven as he truly, wholly is. To see him as both man and woman and neither, to both see him as truly alien and fully recognise and appreciate and connect with his humanity (Le Guin uses to mean personhood), to see through the vast differences between them to Estraven's individuality, and love him genuinely. And despite all this, it's Estraven that ultimately fails to see Genly unclouded and love him solely for his individual self, unentangled with the identity of another. At least, not in those last moments where he might have somehow said goodbye. Again, the unfairness of it leaves me bereft and mourning.
As David Mitchell put it and I could not phrase better, "Ursula Le Guin is a chemist of the heart".
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