Anti Violence Motif
The motif of anti-violence continues to occur throughout the novella. There is a wide variety of violence demonstrated in the story: violence towards women, towards servants and slaves, and also abuses of power. There is also an expression of a fear of the concept of violence; the author believes that violence is not an inherent trait but a concept that it taught, and she expresses this through the character of Selver, who is worried that in order to achieve freedom from the colonists, his people have been introduced to violence, which they neither knew about or experienced before. This, he feels, has changed them forever because it is now a possibility that they can turn to rather than an alien concept.
Vietnam War Allegory
The story is not so much an allegory of the war in Vietnam but of Le Guin's belief about the war in Vietnam, in which Le Guin saw the Americans as the aggressors, like the Terrans and the way in which they introduce violence to a previously peaceful culture and introduce violence into a way of life that has previously not known violence.
Holocaust Allegory
The Athsheans exterminate all of the women in the Terran colony which is an allegory of the Nazi extermination of Jewish women during World War Two. The theory behind the extermination was the prevention of the continuation of the race; by exterminating the Terran women, the Athsheans were able to prevent the Terrans from procreating and increasing in number. This was the same theory that drove the extermination of Jewish women by the Nazis.
Selver's Scars Symbol
Selver attacks Davidson after his wife is raped, and he comes off worse in the altercation. If not for the intervention of Lyubov, Davidson would have killed Selver. As it is he wounds him terribly, and he is horribly scarred. The scars are a symbol of their fight, and of what Davidson has done, and they are the only way in which Davidson recognizes his former foe.
Davidson Symbol
Davidson is a symbol of gratuitous violence, and the way in which violence has a way of increasing itself with no specific purpose. He is not violent because he is a patriot, or because his superiors are giving him orders; his violence is more innate, and he appears to not even know why he is violent the majority of the time. He is a symbol of the effects of violence and of the way in which it is a mindset that is almost impossible to change.
