The Dispossessed: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

In a flashback, the narration transitions to a sunlit nursery on Anarres. A group of children play together, but off in a corner, two babies have separated from the group. A fat baby plays with a peg board, and a knobby baby sits in a square of light and looks up at the sun. In the anteroom outside the nursery, the nursery matron talks with a tall and sad-looking man, Palat, who informs her that his child’s mother has been sent to work in Abbenay, and the child will need to be taken into the nursery full-time. The man himself will be moving back into a dormitory. The matron wonders aloud whether the man will soon be sent along after his partner Rulag, as they are both engineers. Palat explains that his partner is wanted by the Central Institute of Engineering, and that he is not as talented as she is.

Palat looks in at his child playing in the main room. The fat baby approaches the skinny one, pushing him out of the sunlight and into the shade. The knobby infant throws a fit, telling the fat baby to go away, and proclaiming that the sun belongs to him. The matron enters the room to separate the two children, warning the knobby one—a young Shevek—that “nothing” is his, and that if something cannot be shared it cannot be used at all.

Years later, in a Speaking-and-Listening class at an Anarresti learning center, a lanky eight-year-old child stands up to offer his voice. The child is Shevek, and his instructor urges him to share his idea with the group. Shevek describes a complicated physics problem in which a rock being thrown at a tree “always has to go half of the way that’s left to go.” As the class animatedly asks questions and struggles to understand Shevek’s idea, the instructor interjects. He tells Shevek that he is “egoizing”—he is not sharing selflessly with the group. The instructor explains to the class that because Shevek cannot understand speech as a two-way function, he is disruptive to the group, and then he dismisses Shevek from the class.

Shevek goes out into the hallway as his classmates begin telling a group story, taking turns to each share a part of it. Shevek stops himself from crying by thinking about an imaginary Square which functions like a complicated math problem, in which numbered rows on each side of the cube all add up equally. Shevek wishes he had a group in which he could talk about the kind of problems he’s interested in.

Shevek decides that he can wait for such a thing to come about—he is good at waiting. He has been waiting for his mother to come back for years, and he regularly waits six decads—a period of sixty days—for his father to come take him away for a visit.

On one of these visits with his father, Shevek asks Palat if Palat has ever seen a book only made of numbers. Palat takes a mathematics workbook out of his jacket pocket and shows it to Shevek, explaining that the book contains logarithms. In return, Shevek explains his complicated, imaginary Square to his father. By the time the two are done exchanging ideas, it is late, and Palat rushes Shevek back to the children’s dormitory for the night.

In his dreams that evening, Shevek runs across barren land toward a dark, dense, and high wall. He longs to cross it, but knows that if he does, he will never be able to go home again. Shevek hits at the wall and screams, but his voice comes out strangled and wordless. He hears his father’s voice and senses his mother’s presence, and together they tell him to look at a stone on the ground. The stone bears “the primal number that [is] both unity and plurality.” He is filled with a “piercing joy,” the sensation of which he remembers in the morning though he forgets the details of the dream itself. From then on, Shevek often dreams of the wall, but the dream is always “sullen and without resolution,” devoid of that initial joy.

Some years later, in school, Shevek and his friends are reading the Life of Odo, a book of Anarresti history. The book mentions prisons, which do not exist on Anarres, but which Shevek and his friends imagine in great detail and with which they find themselves deeply fascinated. The boys cannot understand why people in prisons couldn’t just leave, or how they could be sentenced to work during their incarceration. Shevek and his friends Tirin, Kadagv, and Gibesh want to know what prison must have been like, and decide to construct a makeshift prison in a crawl space beneath the learning center. Big enough for one person to lie down in, it is made of concrete, and the boys find another slab of concrete they can use to make a “door.”

Many of their friends volunteer to go into the “prison,” but it is Kadagv, a “serious, domineering” twelve-year-old, who wants to undertake the challenge most. When the other children ask him how long he would like to stay in the prison, Kadagv tells them that they, as his captors, must decide the length of his stay. As Kadagv crawls into the hole, the other children hope he won’t stay in too long, as they are all anxious for their turns as well.

After four hours, the children let Kadagv out. He tells them that he mostly napped, and that though he was a little bit hungry, being imprisoned was no big deal. Tirin asks Kadagv if he would go in again, and Kadagv says he would. Tirin asks Kadagv if he’d go in right now, without knowing when he’d be let out again, and Kadagv agrees. Realizing that in prisons, prisoners were given meals, Shevek urges two other boys to go get some leftovers from the cafeteria, so that Kadagv will at least be fed.

Tirin tells Kadagv to turn around and put his hands on his head. Kadagv asks why, and Tirin tells him that it doesn’t matter why—as guards, they can beat him whenever they want, because he is not free. Tirin pushes Kadagv into the cell, and Kadagv injures a finger landing on the hard concrete. The younger boys return with some food and water, and silently place it in Kadagv’s cell, then lock him in. Gibesh wonders where Kadagv will relieve himself, and Tirin answers that Kadagv will have to piss and crap in his own bed. The boys share a hearty laugh at this idea, aware that Kadagv, on the other side of the wall, can hear them laughing at him.

Back at their dormitory, Tirin and Shevek decide that they will force Kadagv to spend two full days in prison. The following afternoon, on a trip to work at the lumber recycling workshop, the lumber foreman asks where Kadagv is. The boys reply that he must have joined another work group for the day, and Shevek is full of an “inward and vile” kind of embarrassment. During his work shift, Shevek is unable to think of anything but Kadagv.

After dinner, Gibesh, who has been standing guard outside the “cell,” approaches Tirin and Shevek to tell them that he heard Kadagv calling out in an odd voice. Shevek wants to let Kadagv out, but Tirin insists on keeping him in the cell. Shevek defies Tirin and heads for the “prison,” where he opens the doors to set Kadagv free. Kadagv emerges from the cell, hunched and stinking. He has had a bout of diarrhea, and is covered in his own feces. He asks the other boys how long he was in the cell altogether, and they estimate it was about thirty hours. Kadagv hazily replies that thirty hours is a “pretty long” time.

Shevek takes Kadagv to the baths to get cleaned up, and then goes alone to the latrines, where he vomits profusely. Shaking and tired, he returns to his dormitory and goes to bed early. None of the boys ever return to the prison, and none of them ever speak of the “episode” again—except for Gibesh, who tells the story to a group of older boys and girls, but when they do not understand, he drops the subject.

At the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences, four teenage boys sit on a hilltop, looking out at the Institute and up at the Moon. Tirin comments that just as they are all sitting looking at Urras and thinking of it as their own moon, surely there are people on Urras right now looking up at Anarres and thinking of the planet as their moon. One of the boys, Bedap, asks what the Truth is, if both planets are each other’s moons.

The boys have come to the hilltop for some “masculine company,” despairing over their misery about girls. Whether they copulate with the girls around them or ignore them, it makes no difference—girls are everywhere. In history class a few days ago, the boys all watched footage of life on Urras. They saw footage of children’s bodies being burned during a famine in the nation of Thu, and prostitutes in the wealthy state of A-Io lying on the beach all day while they wait for the members of the “propertied class” to “use” them. Meanwhile, members of the “unpropertied” class served dinners to the prostitutes and their men. The luxurious world of A-Io and the disease-ridden Thu were shown side by side to contrast the inequality in Urrasti society.

The boys speculate that Urrasti society must be more or less the same now as it was in the footage, though it has been a long time since the Odonian Revolution, when Odonian Urrastis fled the planet and settled on Anarres. Tirin says that there is no way to tell what life on Urras is like now, since there is no communication between the two worlds. Bedap interjects, saying that the PDC keeps in touch with Urrasti freighters, as the two planets trade with one another and keep tabs on how much of a threat one planet is to the other.

The boys talk disgustedly about Urrasti society, though Tirin wonders if all Urrasti are as bad as they seem to be from the hundred-and-fifty-year-old footage. Tirin tells the boys that they only know what they are told about Urras, and that there must be more to the planet and its society. As the boys discuss the value of hating or fearing Urras, Tirin wonders aloud what it would be like to go there, noting that the PDC wants to keep Anarresti from traveling to Urras at any cost.

If Anarresti society truly is superior to all other societies, Tirin argues, they should be able to go to Urras and help the Urrasti—however, they are forbidden to. Shevek argues that the word “forbidden” is not “organic,” and that no one on Anarres forbids anyone from doing anything. Shevek argues that Anarresti do not leave Anarres because they are Anarres, and that no true Odonian would want to travel to Urras to go live in a prison. Bedap says that though Shevek has a point, Tirin is also right—it would be useful to know the whole truth about Urras. Shevek asks who Bedap thinks is lying to the Anarresti about Urras, and Bedap replies by asking, “Who but ourselves?”

A forest has been constructed on Anarres, but the vast plains of the Southwest are uninhabited, and they make up a region called the Dust. Once the Dust was a forest of holums, but drought has killed the trees and dried the soil, creating a dust that covers everything. At eighteen years old, Shevek, now out of the Institute and stuck in the Dust on a work assignment, longs to get back to physics.

Everyone living and working in the Dust suffers from the same cough. Shevek has a few friends, with whom he talks while passing the time working on planting a new forest, but mostly Shevek finds his coworkers dull. Shevek has been at the afforestation project for several decads, and passes the time writing to his friends back at the Institute. Shevek laments the fact that his friends were able to stay behind and work on physics, while he himself has been shipped out to the desert and is “wast[ing his] central function.”

Despite his dissatisfaction, Shevek marvels at the happiness he achieves from completing tangible work in a group. One night, he propositions one of his coworkers, a woman named Gimar, but she refuses him, stating that she has a partner at home. Shevek tells Gimar that he thinks “life partnership is against the Odonian ethic” of sharing. Gimar argues that in an economy of sharing, nothing is more precious than sharing one’s days and nights with another individual. Shevek confesses that he’s worried he is not built for such intimacy, and Gimar comforts him.

Shevek embarks on a sexual relationship with a woman named Beshun. Eventually, Shevek’s rotation on the afforestation project comes to a close, and Shevek becomes emotional as he looks back from the truck bearing him away from camp and sees a “veil of life” over the desert terrain. Beshun, who is leaving camp as well, comforts him as he cries.

At a truck depot on his way back to the Institute, Shevek finds himself in a philosophical discussion with another man, Vokep, who asserts that “all women are propertarians,” and women can only relate to men through the lens of owning or being owned. Shevek, who has recently broken up with Beshun, reflects on the lack of “proprietary idioms for the sexual act” in the Pravic language. Sex and intimacy are not about “having” or “owning,” he thinks, as no one possesses anyone else. After his brief but intense relationship with Beshun, Shevek thinks, he will never have another of its kind. Vokep urges Shevek to never let himself be owned by anyone, and Shevek assures Vokep that he won’t.

Shevek is delighted to return to the scenic and familiar Regional Institute. Though Shevek believes that “you shall not go down twice to the same river,” he is grateful to have returned to a place he loves, and finds that his relationship to the Institute is more complex now.

Shevek feels he has grown up quite a lot in the year he has been away, and thinks that his male friends his age are stuck in childhood. Tirin and Bedap’s lives revolve around copulation and self-centered egoizing, and so Shevek “welcome[s]” isolation. After a year of physical labor, Shevek is ready to return to intellectual work, and excited to explore the ideas he has been contemplating while far away in the Dust. The senior physicist at Northsetting, Mitis, is a wise and calm woman. In a meeting with Shevek, she reveals that she has forwarded one of his papers to a physicist named Sabul in Abbenay, and Sabul has written back with just a single equation. Shevek realizes that the equation is what has been missing from his work, and immediately begins scribbling notes to himself.

Mitis tells Shevek that Sabul will now want him to come to Abbenay to work alongside him. Shevek tells Mitis he does not want to go, but Mitis urges Shevek to seek out the best in his field in order to complete his research. Though Mitis wants Shevek to go, she also warns him to bear in mind that if he goes to study with Sabul, he will become “his man.” In Pravic, possessive pronouns are used infrequently, and Shevek notes that Mitis’s use of the words “his man” strikes him as odd. Nevertheless, Mitis tells Shevek that he has work to do, and he must do it. He interprets her urging him to “get to work” as her urging him to finish the equation in front of him, and will not realize until much later in his life that Mitis was urging him on to something even more.

The night before Shevek leaves for Abbenay, his friends throw him a party. They have pooled their resources to provide an enormous amount of delicious food and fruit drinks, and some students perform skits and songs. As the night winds down, some couples sneak off to private rooms to copulate, while Shevek, Bedap, Tirin, and three girls sit together and talk about everything, from the nature of happiness to temporal theory. One pretty girl with short hair and high cheekbones hangs on Shevek’s every word.

As Shevek waxes poetic on the nature of suffering, he argues that no society, no matter how egalitarian or how utopic, can prevent suffering. He confesses to his friends that he is afraid of life, and afraid of encountering great pain as he grows older. He recounts a tale from his time in the desert, during which he saw a man caught in an automobile accident suffer for hours as his burns consumed him. Shevek has come to understand, he says, that no one can save anyone else. Brotherhood, he believes, begins in shared pain, though he admits he does yet not know where it ends.