At first glance, it would seem that Ursula K. Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark have nothing in common. However, upon reading both books, the idea of freedom and what it means to be truly free can be seen in both books. Throughout the second portion of Playing in the Dark, Morrison discusses the notion of how the white man, even in America, the land of the free, needs the black man to be enslaved to truly feel freedom. I found this idea to be interesting. We live in a society today where there aren’t slaves and where everyone is free and “equal,” and yet don’t we all feel freedom. Morrison says it best when she notes on page 56 that “the fatal ending (of Huck Finn) becomes the elaborate deferment of a necessary and necessarily unfree Africanist character’s escape, because freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the specter of enslavement.” This makes me believe that humans are not capable of understanding freedom, or anything else for that matter, unless they are forced to live without it, or see someone who is. The fact that Jim is a slave on this adventure allows the reader to see it in a riskier light, because he is trying to become free, while Huck is on a simple adventure. However, Morrison does make a good point by saying that “nothing highlighted freedom … like slavery”(38). This drastic contrast shows the difference between the two. Without slavery, there cannot be freedom, or it cannot be truly appreciated. After all, if everyone is a slave, no one is free and nobody knows what it is like to be free.
This idea of not knowing can be translated to not knowing what freedom is can also be seen in Ursula K. Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven. In The Lathe of Heaven, the argument is slightly different. In the beginning of the novel we find that George Orr is a broken man who is taking drugs to keep from dreaming. In the novel rather than the examples that Morrison uses, however, George is not enslaved, in terms of the modern idea of slavery, but he is controlled. His freedom is taken away. He simply wants one thing, to stop “effectively” dreaming, he just wants to be normal. However, Dr. Haber essentially enslaves him and makes him his slave so that he can shape the world the way he wants it to be. George’s “slavery” does not come from race, but from his gift. He is special and therefore Haber wants to be able to recreate the process. Leguin does bring in the idea of race creating tension and then leading to war over freedom when she has George change the world and everyone is at war. People in the Middle East are fighting and ironically she has reverse apartheid going on in South Africa. Haber has Orr change this world and make it into one that is void of race and color, where everyone is gray, so that there is “no question of race” (129). Since Leguin makes the change “biological and absolute,” (129) she is saying that prejudice is due to our physical appearance. People go to war over basic differences and people will all be free and equal if we are all the same because no one will enslave their own brother. I find this idea to be quite interesting since George is still enslaved and the aliens are still not treated equally. While there is no more racism and people are “equal,” George is still enslaved by Haber in every world he creates. This makes me think that you can’t eliminate racism and thus give everyone absolute freedom because people always want to be superior to other people and want power and control.
I believe that the idea of oppression based on differences is also evident in the Matrix. In the Matrix, it is obvious that people’s freedom has been violated. The creator of the Matrix tells Neo that the oracle created a system where 99% of humans subconsciously submit to the Matrix, and thus are not free. The A.I.’s like Agent Smith enslave the humans in the Matrix because they believe themselves to be better than the humans. They do not think that the humans can ever hope to come close to them, and thus are surprised that Neo can defeat them. Ultimately, maybe they enslave the humans to prove that they can and that they are indeed superior to us. Like George does in The Lathe of Heaven, humans do rebel, because we will not be enslaved. Ultimately the Wachowski brothers take the same opinion of Leguin in terms of race amongst humans not being an issue, but race, or a state of being is still an issue where people see each other as superior. After all, if everyone is free and equal it much harder to prove one’s own superiority as a race.