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While it might be reductive to assert that Wonderful Alexander is simply Tehanu for younger children, or to simply equate Alexander with Ged or Tenar as drawers-out of others, the subtextual connections are there, as they are across all of Le Guin’s fiction. This is what makes her a crossover writer, after all. For across Le Guin’s work for young children different combinations of animal-human relations exist. In the two books about Kroy, The Adventure of Cobbler’s Rune and Solomon Leviathan’s Nine Hundred and Thirty-First Trip Around the World, there are only anthropomorphic animals and no humans.

Qxd 9/23/04 2:53 PM Page 21 Connecting Characters on the Continuum of Viewpoint 21 The last set of lines is the vertical, by which I also organize this discussion. I organize this discussion by genre—the lines that purport to divide literary texts and contexts. I do this in order to illustrate the degree to which Le Guin’s generic contexts evince the same narrative strategies to achieve or deny character relationships. Do the vertical lines actually divide, or are they simply different contexts, more parallels, for the same line?

The result is, not surprisingly, a difference in degree rather than kind. Through the character narration we are given deep insight into two characters from within and without, and their resulting intimate, narrative connection enables them to complete the larger purposes of the novel. Estraven’s narration comes later in the book in the form of journal entries, and is used to help us revise our (and Genly’s) opinion of his character, and of Genly’s own. Le Guin chooses to allow the characters to speak to us from the same narrative distance, unlike in either The Lathe of Heaven or The Word for World Is Forest in which the external narrator and character focalizers were separated by different degrees of proximity.