The Dispossessed | Characters & Character Analysis

The Dispossessed Characters

Shevek

The protagonist of the novel, Shevek also offers the novel's main point of view. He is a temporal physicist, which means that he studies time, on Anarres and is devoted to the ideology on which his society was founded. In his youth, this devotion is blind; he defends any verbal attack on his society and declares the Odonian way of life to be superior to any other. In spite of the inconveniences of Odonian life, he believes that everyone is working for the common good and that all his sacrifices are worth it in the grand scheme. But as an adult, his experiences as a partner, father, and friend lead him to think otherwise. His partnership with Takver ends a long, painful period of isolation in which he worked out his feelings over his mother's abandonment, and in which the "normal" activity of copulating, but not forming bonds, is unsatisfying...
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