ABSTRACT
Harold Bloom compliments Le Guin as a writer of “precise, dialectical style.”1 Le Guin does not seem to value dialectic, however. There are many different unreconciled ideas in Le Guin’s work. In the Earthsea books alone, Le Guin purportedly draws on Taoism, Jungian psychology, various feminisms, different models of anthropology, “the Hermetic and Neo-Platonic traditions and some elements of Zen,”2 Sartre’s existentialism, and “Buber’s I-Thou relationship and some of Martin Heidegger’s ideas on speech and being.”3 We would have trouble synthesizing these many systems, to be sure. I don’t think Le Guin is asking us to.
