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 days unless he turns around and faces it. Through Ged’s struggle with the shadow (which he ultimately comes to realize is a part of himself), Ursula K. Le Guin suggests that life’s central battle is the fight to recognize, accept, and integrate all of the disparate, dark, shadowed parts of one’s identity—even those parts one might find frightening, hateful, or untamable.
When Ged accidentally unleashes a terrible shadow being into the world during a schoolyard duel with Jasper, his rival at the school for wizards on Roke, Ged finds himself facing down a journey he never expected he’d have to take—a journey of intimate self-understanding rather than one of pursuing power, glory, and renown. Ged finds himself forced to confront a deeply personal and profoundly existential challenge at what should be the bright, boundless start of a new career—rather than chasing dreams of power and wizardry, he finds himself contending with an enemy that reflects his own folly and hubris back and him and forces him to reconsider major questions about his path. Ged imagined that his life’s story would be one of glory and achievement—but his encounter with the shadow prepares him for the realization that the great challenge of his life may already have been ordained. After healing from the wounds the shadow inflicts upon him during their first encounter, Ged wonders if he will have to outrun the shadow that pursues him for the rest of his days. His internal struggle to comprehend what has befallen him represents the ways in which people come to see the emotional, psychological, and intellectual challenge of coming of age and understanding oneself as drudgery rather than an adventure in and of itself. Before Ged recognizes what the shadow is—part of himself—he sees it as something external, uncontrollable, and fearsome rather than a part of himself he must learn to accept and reintegrate.
Though Ged is severely wounded and nearly killed during his first encounter with the shadow, future encounters force him to look inward and confront the shadow as a part of himself that he unleashed. As Ged meets the shadow again and again throughout his travels around Earthsea (and in his own dreams from time to time), the shadow does not attack him as violently and maliciously as it did during their first meeting. It tries to deceive him by disguising itself in the bodies of others, and it does attempt to hurt Ged, but it is never as strong as the moment in which it first emerged—a moment in which Ged longed for power and total control. The shadow grows weaker the more Ged learns about it, reflecting the fact that the more one understands about oneself, the less frightening and seemingly unconquerable the dark parts of one’s inner self become. These relatively anticlimactic encounters with the shadow throughout Earthsea demonstrate that the struggle to understand, conquer, and integrate the darkest parts of oneself is not necessarily a single, epic standoff, but rather a laborious and inward-looking process—yet one that gets easier all the time. Ged is ultimately able to recognize his shadow as the darkest, most horrible part of himself, and, in naming it, he is able to integrate it into himself once more. After chasing the shadow to the end of the world and confronting it by calling out its true name—his own name—Ged reabsorbs the shadow, and his struggles against it are finished. By realizing that the shadow is and always was part of himself—and by calling it Ged, its true name—Ged is able to tame the shadow and allow it to return to the mysterious place from whence it came, which turns out to be from the depths of Ged’s very soul. Le Guin thus reveals that Ged’s struggle against the monster has always been a metaphorical struggle against the darkest part of himself. The shadow existed to hurt Ged, to taunt him, to distract him from his path, and to deceive him into a constant state of fear, suspicion, trepidation, and self-loathing. By realizing that the darkest part of himself is the part associated with fear, self-destructive behavior, and sabotage, Ged is able to understand it, name it, calm it, and return it to the depths of his soul. By integrating the shadow back into himself, Ged accepts that there is no darkness without light, and vice versa. The dark, shadowed part of himself will always exist—but by accepting it rather than seeing it as an enemy, he can at last begin life on his own terms.
In accepting that he will doom himself to a life of fear and misery should he try to exist separately from the darkest parts of his inner self, Ged comes to understand one of life’s most important lessons: that the self is a many-faceted—even fractured—thing. As Ged comes to appreciate that there is no shadow without light, he at last comprehends that he must not reject the parts of himself he fears or despises. Instead, he must learn to accept and live with them, willingly integrating the many disparate parts of his personality.
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Identity and the Shadow Self ThemeTracker
Identity and the Shadow Self Quotes in A Wizard of Earthsea
He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy's arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.
If the student complained the Master might say nothing, but lengthen the list; or he might say, "He who would be Seamaster must know the true name of every drop of water in the sea."
Only for a moment did the spirit glimmer there. Then the sallow oval between Ged’s arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged's face.
"Lord Gensher, I do not know what it was—the thing that came out of the spell and cleaved to me—"
"Nor do I know. It has no name. You have great power inborn in you, and you used that power wrongly, to work a spell over which you had no control, not knowing how that spell affects the balance of light and dark, life and death, good and evil. And you were moved to do this by pride and by hate. Is it any wonder the result was ruin?”
No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. […] If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man’s name, holds that man's life in his keeping. Thus to Ged, who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakable trust.
Either he must go down the hill into the desert lands and lightless cities of the dead, or he must step across the wall back into life, where the formless evil thing waited for him.
"If you could name it you could master it, maybe, little wizard. Maybe I could tell you its name, when I see it close by. And it will come close, if you wait about my isle. It will come wherever you come. If you do not want it to come close you must run, and run, and keep running from it. And yet it will follow you. Would you like to know its name?"
"Leave me at Serd and sail where you like. It's not against your ship this wind blows, but against me."
"Against you, a wizard of Roke?"
"Have you never heard of the Roke-wind, master?"
“Aye, that keeps off evil powers from the Isle of the Wise, but what has that to do with you, a Dragontamer?"
"That is between me and my shadow," Ged answered shortly, as a wizard will; and he said no more as they went swiftly, with a steady wind and under clearing skies, back over the sea to Serd.
“It will speak of things that were, and are, and will be. It told of your coming, long before you came to this land. Will you ask a question of it now?"
“No."
"It will answer you."
"There is no question I would ask it."
"It might tell you," Serret said in her soft voice, "how you will defeat your enemy."
Ged stood mute.
"Do you fear the stone?" she asked as if unbelieving; and he answered, "Yes."
"I have no strength against the thing," Ged answered.
Ogion shook his head… […] "Strange," he said: "You had strength enough to outspell a sorcerer in his own domain, there in Osskil. You had strength enough to withstand the lures and fend off the attack of the servants of an Old Power of Earth. And at Pendor you had strength enough to stand up to a dragon."
"It was luck I had in Osskil, not strength," Ged replied, and he shivered again as he thought of the dreamlike deathly cold of the Court of the Terrenon. “As for the dragon, I knew his name. The evil thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name."
“All things have a name," said Ogion.
"You must turn around."
"Turn around?"
"If you go ahead, if you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter."
There was a great wish in him to stay here on Gont, and forgoing all wizardry and venture, forgetting all power and horror, to live in peace like any man on the known, dear ground of his home land. That was his wish; but his will was other.
The shadow had tricked him out onto the moors in Osskil, and tricked him in the mist onto the rocks, and now would there be a third trick? Had he driven the thing here, or had it drawn him here, into a trap? He did not know. He knew only the torment of dread, and the certainty that he must go ahead and do what he had set out to do: hunt down the evil, follow his terror to its source.
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
"Pride was ever your mind's master," his friend said smiling, as if they talked of a matter of small concern to either. "Now think: it is your quest, assuredly, but if the quest fails, should there not be another there who might bear warning to the Archipelago? For the shadow would be a fearful power then. And if you defeat the thing, should there not be another there who will tell of it in the Archipelago, that the Deed may be known and sung? I know I can be of no use to you; yet I think I should go with you."
On the course on which they were embarked, the saying of the least spell might change chance and move the balance of power and of doom: for they went now toward the very center of that balance, toward the place where light and darkness meet. Those who travel thus say no word carelessly.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.
“The wound is healed,” [Ged] said, “I am whole, I am free.” […]
And [Vetch] began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
In the Deed of Ged nothing is told of that voyage nor of Ged's meeting with the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragons' Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Archmage of all the islands of the world.
