Space Trilogy: Sudden Understanding

By: Amy Stello

I feel that many of my classes this semester deal in the realm of examining things that are "Other" to us. May it be culture, or race or religion, there are too many times that humanity creates a line in the sand, so to speak, and makes a judgment who is on which side of that line. Out of the Silent Planet broaches this idea of "otherness." In my other philosophy class, Current Trends in Modern Thought, we have studied the idea of ambiguous figures. Through one perspective the lady is young and through another she is old. Clearly Lewis is not exactly what we would call a postmodernist thinker, but he sees the value of getting outside of our presupposed beliefs that actually are created by the society in which we live.
In a way, Hrossa are "ambiguous figures." Sometimes they are so strange to Ransom that he is unable to relate in any way to them while in another he jumps right into their society. Lewis writes that this makes Ransom uneasy while he is in their society. I think this fearfulness is always something that comes up when one is faced with the "other." You may be getting along just fine with those who are considered "alien" and the all of a sudden, the strangeness and difference of it all hits you. Nothing makes you more uneasy and not confident than that sudden realization. Ransom has this realization when he is living with the hrossa and trying to figure out if he can trust them. Only when he starts to examine the hrossa outside of the "comparison with humans" is he able to fully appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of the hrossa. It is interesting to me that Lewis picks up on this idea of cultural struggle and explains it so easily through the Space Trilogy.