A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin (1968)
“A young wizard unleashes a shadow he cannot name, and must chase it to the end of the world to discover it is himself.”
Character Analysis
Three names for one person, and the multiplicity is the point. Duny is the goatherd's child, Sparrowhawk is the public wizard, and Ged is the true self — spoken only to those he trusts with his life. Born poor on Gont, brown-skinned, proud to the point of self-destruction, Ged is Le Guin's anti-Gandalf: not a wise old man dispensing counsel but a young one making catastrophic mistakes and learning from them. His arc is not from weakness to power but from division to wholeness. He begins the novel denying his darkness and ends it by claiming it as himself.
Blunt, direct, economical — the speech of a goatherd's son. Becomes more formal after Roke training but never loses its roughness.