Coming of Age
Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is a Bildungsroman, a novel focusing on the journey of its protagonist from youth toward maturity. As the young boy Duny becomes the wizard-in-training Ged—and as Ged begins to taste the power he will one day embody as the wizard Sparrowhawk—Le Guin charts Ged’s growth. Coming of age for Ged is not easy: he wrestles with pride, self-doubt, and a thirst for power that threatens his…
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Knowledge and Patience vs. Power and Pride
“Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?” Ged’s mentor Ogion asks him as Ged contemplates leaving Ogion’s tutelage and traveling to Roke to attend a prestigious school for wizards. With the careful, deliberate Ogion, Ged knows, he will learn intricate magic but must remain beholden to his master’s careful disbursement of knowledge and information. On Roke, however, Ged knows that he will learn as fast as he is…
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Identity and the Shadow Self
When Ged is still a young wizard-in-training, his prideful desire to best his schoolmate Jasper leads him to cast a spell beyond his prowess—a spell that unleashes a mysterious, horrific, and powerful shadow creature. As Ged comes to terms with what he has done, he finds himself realizing that he cannot spend his life running away from the creature he has loosed on the world—a creature that will hunt him until the end of his…
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Duty and Destiny
In the world of the Earthsea archipelago, wizards and mages are bound by duty to use their gifts to help others in their home communities and beyond. After finishing his prenticeship (the word that denizens of Earthsea use in place of “apprenticeship”) at a school for wizards on the island of Roke, Ged finds himself torn between a sense of duty to fellowship, service, and good works carried out on small, unremarkable islands versus the…
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Cosmic Balance
In the world of the Earthsea archipelago, magic, dragons, and dark spirits abound. Though the fantastical setting of the novel suggests that Earthsea is a world in which anything might happen, Le Guin makes clear that there is a cosmic balance that must be maintained, and that to use spells to conjure great riches, to quickly and miraculously heal deep wounds, or to remove consequences from one’s actions is forbidden. Drawing on the tenets of…
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