Desar

Desar is a mathematician at the Institute on Anarres and an uneasy, recurring presence in Shevek’s life. He is at once a taciturn neighbor who cares for Shevek when illness leaves him vulnerable, a man who hoards goods in a society founded on sharing, and a colleague whose love for Shevek does not prevent deliberate betrayal. His contradictions make him a small but telling figure in the novel’s examination of how private possession and informal power can survive without laws or government.

Identity and Habits

Desar is tall and thin, with an uncorrected walleye that makes it difficult to tell whether he is looking at someone or past them. For a year he and Shevek live side by side in the Institute domicile without exchanging a complete sentence. Their connection begins not with confiding conversation but with proximity and a shared institution; Desar’s compressed speech and reserve continue to shape their encounters.

His room in the domicile gives material form to his distance from Anarresti norms. It contains dishes taken from the commons, library books, woodcarving tools from a craft depot, a laboratory microscope, eight blankets, and a closet full of clothes, including garments that do not fit him and clothes he appears to have worn as a child. Asked why he keeps the accumulation, Desar offers only that things “Just builds up.” Shevek sees not a purposeful collection but a pattern of taking goods without need or authorization, an individual stockpile that sits awkwardly within a culture organized around common use.

Desar’s mathematics follows the same logic of concealment. He selects an esoteric field that no one at the Institute or the Math Federation can readily evaluate, and the narrator makes clear that this lack of scrutiny is precisely why he chose it. He assumes Shevek has chosen his own work for the same reason. To Desar, scientific research is less a demanding public vocation than a means of securing a comfortable post; he reduces Shevek’s commitment to temporal physics to “Sequency, Simultaneity, shit.” His cynicism offers a sharp contrast to Shevek’s conviction that difficult work and intellectual exchange carry ethical stakes.

Care and Uneasy Companionship

When Shevek returns home after ten days in hospital, Desar visits from the neighboring room. Their conversation is brief and halting, but Desar brings over two dinners from the Institute refectory and continues bringing food morning and evening for three days, until Shevek can go out again. The practical care is unmistakable even if its motive is not. Shevek finds it hard to understand why Desar helps him: Desar is not outwardly friendly, and the ideal of brotherhood seems to mean little to him.

Shevek nevertheless chooses to stay close to Desar as part of a conscious effort to change his own life. Illness has made him recognize that trying to live and work entirely alone could break him down. He judges his isolation as a moral failure, though the narrator describes his youthful response as a rigid, intensely internalized version of Odonian teaching. Desar’s company is not an uncomplicated cure: Shevek alternately likes and detests him, sometimes because of the very same qualities. Their association therefore places Shevek’s desire for connection beside the discomfort of accepting a companion who does not fit his ethical ideals.

The connection persists beyond the hospital episode. At a later gathering with Takver and others, Desar is still around Shevek, though he seldom speaks to Takver. When the group discusses what “hell” means, Desar supplies his terse answer: “Means Urras.” The remark is consistent with his spare, oblique manner, while also placing him within the shared conversations and relationships that Shevek’s life has built beyond the Institute. His continuing presence does not make him an open or easy friend; it shows instead that attachment can endure alongside reserve and friction.

Possession, Attachment, and Public Judgment

Shevek’s friend Bedap sees the blanket in Shevek’s room and jokes that Shevek lives like a profiteer. Shevek answers that it was already there when he arrived and asks whether a blanket is excessive on a cold night. The exchange invokes the same contested boundary that Desar’s room makes more disturbing: in a society where objects are meant to be used and shared rather than owned, keeping something can be read as a sign of possessiveness, but its actual circumstances matter. Desar’s cache is not merely one useful blanket; its range, quantity, and apparent lack of need make it a conspicuous accumulation.

A larger contrast sharpens the significance of that private hoarding. Anarres depends on an intricate exchange of regional resources, with roads built before houses and goods continually circulated to sustain communities too dispersed to be self-sufficient. The coordination of labor and distribution is centered in Abbenay, where the computers and federative bodies that organize the work operate. The Settlers recognized centralization as a lasting danger and understood that it required continuing vigilance. Desar’s unexplained accumulation is a personal breach within this sharing system, while the system’s own dependence on coordination makes clear why neither social ideals nor administrative arrangements can simply eliminate the possibility of possessive behavior.

Shevek’s critique of informal power gives the tension between them a political dimension. He argues that Anarres has no government or laws, but that public opinion can still become an unadmitted government when people refuse to think or change. In this account, an individual such as Sabul can exercise power not through formal authority but through others’ fear and conformity. Desar’s conduct is not identified as part of a formal structure, and the novel does not make him a representative of one; nonetheless, his later maneuver against Shevek shows how personal interest and opaque influence can operate inside institutions that officially reject hierarchy.

Betrayal and the Divided Relationship

During a conversation about an Institute reorganization, Desar tells Shevek that he put in a word for him at a meeting. Shevek does not yet know the details, but recognizes that Desar is lying: he has put in a word against him. The lie turns Desar’s earlier reticence into something more consequential. He has not merely failed to offer support; he has secretly worked to damage Shevek’s position while presenting himself as an advocate.

Shevek then understands why Desar has sometimes inspired such intense dislike. He recognizes in him “the element of pure malice,” but also sees that Desar loves him and is trying to gain power over him. The revelation does not cancel the earlier care: Desar really did bring food during Shevek’s recovery, and he has remained close to him. Nor does that history excuse the sabotage. What Shevek finds equally detestable is the combination itself—the possessiveness and malice interwoven with affection, and the attempt to use love as a means of gaining leverage.

Shevek refuses to accommodate this entanglement. He says nothing further to Desar, finishes breakfast, and walks across the quadrangle to the physics office. The departure is a decisive break in their immediate exchange, but not a reconciliation or a full account of what Desar does afterward. Desar remains significant as a character through whom the book tests the distance between professed solidarity and actual conduct: neither personal affection nor a society’s egalitarian principles guarantee that power and possession have disappeared.