How we cite our quotes: (Chapter. Paragraph)
Quote #1
"It keeps spreading," Orr said, feeling inadequate and despondent. "The war, I mean." (3.8)
What is it about George's world that makes war keep spreading? How would you compare his world to our world? Why is it so difficult to stop the violence?
Quote #2
She felt no mercy for him; as she should have felt for a sick man, a schiz or paranoid with delusions of manipulating reality. Here was "another casualty of these times of ours that try men's souls," as President Merdle, with his happy faculty for fouling a quotation, had said in his State of the Union message; and here she was being mean to a poor lousy bleeding casualty with holes in his brain. (4.40)
President Merdle has mangled a quote from Thomas Paine's "The American Crisis," which was a series of pamphlets published to encourage the soldiers during the American Revolution. It appears that President Merdle is trying to make the American people believe that the wars they are currently involved in are as noble as the American Revolution. However, the last sentence, referring to "a poor lousy bleeding casualty with holes in his brain," seems to reference the Vietnam War, which was going on while Ursula Le Guin was writing this novel. In other words, whatever President Merdle says, it seems like people see this war as something like Vietnam—a war that a lot of people in the '60s and '70s saw as a total sham.
Quote #3
"I was burying them. In one of the big ditches ... I did work in the Interment Corps, when I was sixteen, after my parents got it.... Only in the dream the people were all naked and looked like they'd died of starvation. Hills of them. I had to bury them all. I kept looking for you, but you weren't there." (5.94)
George is telling us a dream he had about the plague years. With references to "Internment Corps" and hills of dead people, it seems like he is using imagery related to World War II and the Holocaust. Why do you think Le Guin is reminding us of that war and those atrocities?