George Orr

Character Analysis

The Most Extraordinarily Ordinary Man in the World

How could you manage to be extraordinarily ordinary? Wouldn't that just make you extraordinary? Or just ordinary? Maybe extraordinary in an ordinary way?

Anyway, somehow George Orr manages to be both ordinary and extraordinary at once. Let's back up and see what's up with Mr. Ordinary Orr.

Whenever a character in the novel meets George, he or she is struck by just how boring and nondescript he really is. Here's how Dr. Haber describes him, for example:

The patient uncertainly withdrew his almost-proffered hand, fingered his necklace nervously, and said, 'How do you do.' The necklace was the usual long chain of silvered steel. Clothing ordinary, office-worker standard; haircut conservative shoulder-length, beard short. Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, 28 to 32. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional. (2.9)

Sounds like the type of guy who'd be perfect as a movie extra, right? He could walk right past you, and you would never know that he was there.

George isn't only ordinary in his looks—he's ordinary in just about every other way, too. When Dr. Haber runs a battery of tests on him, he comes up smack in the middle of every single diagnostic category he can imagine. That's almost a little creepy, isn't it?

The interesting thing about George's normality is that the other characters often take it to mean that he is weak. Dr. Haber can barely contain his impulse to bully George, and Heather thinks that George wouldn't even crunch if she squashed him.

But that's just how he appears at first—and appearances can be deceiving.

Heather and Haber both realize that George Orr is not exactly as he seems. While Dr. Haber only notices momentarily, it's George's underlying, hidden qualities that make Heather Lelache fall in love with him. As she puts it: "Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible. [...] It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved" (7.49).

George is not fake; he's not trying to be anything that he isn't. If you think about it, that actually takes an amazing amount of self-confidence, or at least an amazing amount of integrity. And that's not ordinary.

So even though George comes off as the saddest main character in the world for a large part of the novel, it's only because we are judging him based on his lack of ambition and tenacity. But the whole point of Ursula Le Guin's novel is that things like ambition, tenacity, and the will to power are actually signs of weakness.

Paradoxically, George is actually the strongest character in the whole novel.

A Dreamer

Aside from his hidden strength, the most obvious aspect of George's character that is extraordinary is his ability to dream—and have his dreams come true. Well, they don't really come true, exactly; they change reality so that they are and have always been true. That's almost the same, but not quite.

Now, this is a sci-fi novel, so you might be asking: "Why dreams?" Well, it's partly because Ursula Le Guin was pretty big into Taoism. If you want to read more about Taoism in general, head on over to our "Themes" section; right now, we're just going to talk about Taoism and dreams, specifically.

If you put the words Taoism and dreams together, everyone who knows anything about the two will think about Zhuangzi. Zhuang-what? This guy (his name is sometimes spelled Chuang-Tsu) was an early Taoist philosopher who talked a lot of dreams, usually as metaphors for aspects of human existence. When she talks about dreams, Ursula Le Guin likes to bring out the heavy artillery and pull quotes from Zhuangzi. For example:

Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations. —Chuang Tse: II (1.0)

A wise man hasn't explained it to us, but the idea is we can't really tell the difference between sleep and waking.

But the most famous story from Zhuangzi is one that involves a butterfly dream. According to the story, Zhuangzi dreams that he is a butterfly. Then, we he wakes up, he finds he is Zhuangzi again. But at this point, he asks himself: which is real? Is he a butterfly dreaming that he is Zhuangzi, or is he Zhuangzi dreaming that he is a butterfly?

If you take that and mix it up with Zhuangzi's belief that all life forms have the innate ability to transform their surroundings, it's not difficult to see where Ursula Le Guin got the idea for George's powers. Just like Zhuangzi, George is not sure what is the "real" reality. And all the while George is struggling with that, he's constantly changing the world around him.

You might not have been expecting a philosophy lesson when you started this book, but that's a clear one if we ever saw one.

Dirty Old Hippie

Okay, you got us: the real hippie here is Mannie, who even gets George to drink some cannabis tea. (Is it just us, or does that sound pretty nasty?) But George is kind of a hippie without knowing that he's one.

The hippies were more than those unwashed people you see dancing in old Woodstock videos. They were part of a countercultural youth movement in the 1960s that was invested in politics, religion, sexuality, music, and—yes—drugs. But the two aspects of hippie culture that matter to us in the context of this novel are their politics and their views on religion.

Hippies believed in equal rights, peace, socialism, and even organic farming. But they also believed in not imposing their beliefs on other people. While Dr. Haber is all about forcing the world to follow his agenda, George is way more chill about things. He wants the best for people, but he's not willing to force them into it.

Hippies also believed in various religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Unitarian Universalism. Buddhism is a distant cousin to Taoism. See the trend here?

George is pretty dedicated to the idea of not forcing things—to the point that many of the other characters think he's just lazy:

He had never held a job, in any of his lives, which was quite up his alley; what he knew he was best at was design, the realization of proper and fitting shape and form for things, and this talent had not been in demand in any of his various existences. (9.4)

Underneath all of that, though, whether George knows it or not, is a Taoist trend. He believes that everything has a natural and proper place, and forcing it to change only causes trouble. No wonder he was never suited to being a draftsman.

At the end of the novel, though, George finally gets the job that he should have had all along.

The Worst Date

Oh, yeah: let's not forget about the love story, folks. So, George and Heather. They seem like two characters that could hardly have any kind of interest in one another, but maybe that's what draws them together. Heather says that she loves George's strength, and George loves Heather's… awesomeness? We don't know, but he sure seems to like her a lot.

In fact, it's George's love for Heather that allows him to finally save the world from Dr. Haber's dream. He draws on his relationship with her to support him through the nothingness of Dr. Haber's existence. While Dr. Haber considers himself a "lone wolf," George has relationships with people that are so intense they persist across timelines and realities.

When George brings Heather back at the end of the novel, it's clear that he wants to woo her all over again. The narrator says: "But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again" (11.54). She's different from the lady who was his wife, but he still wants her. We're not sure how we would feel about that, but according to George, she's his Heather, regardless of the timeline.

How's that for pickup line? I love you so much that I'll distort reality for you.

Yeah, on second thought, that's a pretty creepy Hallmark card.