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truth. In the afterword to Olander and Greenberg's Asimov, for example, Asimov first built a case for his not having incorporated in his fiction any of the psychological and artistic aspects the essays discovered in his work because he wrote too fast and did not have the special knowledge necessary. He then admitted that the parallels discovered by others might have been in his unconscious. His customary posture about literary criticism, and often psychological analysis as well, was to deny conscious intent. In 1950, however, he sat, unannounced, in a classroom in which his story "Nightfall" was analyzed, then introduced himself afterward with the comment that the analysis was all wrong. The professor (Gotthard Guenther) replied, "What makes you think, just because you are the author of `Nightfall,' that you have the slightest inkling of what is in it?" After that, Asimov was willing to admit that his subconscious might have slipped things into his story that he did not consciously intend. |
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In The Gods Themselves, however, Asimov was not so much dealing with the parts of human psychology as with the nature of men and women. He wrote that he was convinced at an early age that women were puzzling creatures of mystery and, though he learned about them as he matured, he could not shake his early attitude. |
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Thus Part I of The Gods Themselves has no women characters, and Part III has a woman in an important role (and significantly, in terms of sexual differences, as an "Intuitionist") but working as a tour guide. |
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Part II, however, is focused on Dua, for whom Asimov used the pronoun "she." Tritt and Odeen are referred to as "he." It is the Emotional who is necessary for sex, who has the power to say "yes" or "no." Most Emotionals are foolish, silly, empty-headed creatures, who are concerned mostly with coquettishness, gossip, and basking in the sun; they are even described as gluttonous. They like the company of other Emotionals: Odeen reflects that ''the Rational had his teacher . . . and the Parental his children but the Emotional had all the other Emotionals." Odeen finds them incomprehensible. "Who could tell what any Emotional thought?" he asks himself. "They were so different they made left and right seem alike in everything but mind." |
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In the Rational, Asimov surely identified himself, the rational man, who loves to learn and to teach and who is puzzled by the irrationality of the people around him, by the stubborn parental drives that have created the most serious problem facing the world, and most of all by those emotional responses to situations that cannot be reached by reason. In the novel, Rationals have little understanding of emotional matters. Odeen reflects that "there was almost a perverse pride among |
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