The Dispossessed, like The Four Quartets, centers problematically on the human meaning of time. Taking as its focal consciousness – and conscience – the point of view of a ‘temporal physicist’ and telling of his quest (as he finally regards it) to redeem his past and the future, the book is above all else a science-fictional Bildungsroman. But the uncertainties attending that quest make for a Bildungsroman whose Bildung remains in doubt almost to the very end. Oscillating meanwhile between seemingly antithetical worlds, The Dispossessed describes ‘the waste sad time / Stretching before and after’ Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras.

The Broken Promise: Anarres as Utopia Lost

Those two worlds are polar opposites in a strictly – which is not to say merely – nominal sense. Indeed, Anarres acquires its precise, honorific meaning only when understood as the negative form of Urras. Thought of in that way, and not simply as deriving from ‘anarchy,’ the name points to Odo's original (i.e., an-archic) intent rather than to the chaotic state of affairs actually prevailing on Shevek's home planet at the moment he boards the Mindful bound for Urras. Furthermore, Anarres in the same manner establishes – or educes – the significance of Urras. The latter in itself evokes the Cold War model for the fictional world on which two mutually hostile powers precariously co-exist and over which each seeks exclusive hegemony. Yet the name of that world, in its semantic opposition to Anarres, appears not as a kind of anagrammatic compound of U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. but as an amalgam of the two. After all, A-Io and Thu, despite the enmity that they have for one another and whatever differences in thinking may underlie it, agree in regarding Anarres as an ideological threat, and this policy joins them together as an ‘I-You’ confronting the Anarresti ‘Them.’

For their part, the Anarresti in general reciprocate that animosity. Not only do they make no distinction between A-Io and Thu as embodiments of a ‘propertarianism’ they despise and of the ‘statism’ consequent from it; they by and large look upon all Urrasti as an undifferentiated Them inimical to an Anarresti Us.