Where Odo is now worn out, the youth, such as the young man who wasn’t even born when an earlier uprising took place, are full of spirit and ready to fight. Le Guin is suggesting that revolutions and political movements aren’t necessarily either triumphs or failures: they can often take years or even decades to gather momentum, and as the people leading the revolution change, so does the shape or character of that revolution. Without despair, one cannot feel a sense of triumph. Laia, the third-person narrator tells us, had ‘unlearned despair’ a long time ago. She is ready to return to the state which she occupied before she was born, and let others take up the cause. She did not even live to see the revolution she instigated, but. She is weak, ageing, and lacking in purpose: she knows she has done everything she could do to inspire others to fight. Le Guin’s 1974 multiple-award-winning novel The Dispossessed, the philosopher and revolutionary Laia Asieo Odo is a magisterial presenceeven though she lived on a different planet and died several generations before the period in which the novel is set. But now her political ideas are gathering in strength and popularity, she is at the end of her life. Laia Odo has been working her whole life – her threescore years and twelve, we might say – towards the Revolution. Laia Odo, then, is one who cannot countenance such suffering and wants to found a society in which people will be free to choose how they live their life: nobody will be the child kept in the basement in Omelas.Īnother key idea underpinning ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ is the idea of the ‘Circle of Life’, and ‘true voyage is return’. Topics: age, anti-prison, death, fiction, grief, revolution, sexuality.
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