Analysis Of Ursula K. Le Guin's She Unnames Them

Words: 679
Pages: 3

In this journal entry I shall discuss, analyze, and interpret Ursula K. Le Guin's "She Unnames Them". I will discuss the morality of naming something, how we create stereotypes by naming them, the effect it has upon people, a short description of Guin’s story, and Eve’s need for individuality as a person.
In Guin’s short fiction story the main theme is the morality of names. The setting of the story is possibly a couple of hundred years after Adam and Eve’s creation and is told by Eve as she sets out to un-name the things that Adam was given control to name. One of the things she finds is that the names act as ways to set us apart and make us indifferent for one’s individualities and similarities to others categorized outside their set species. As she goes about removing the names of animals and asking them to do so, she begins to see that the emotions and motives that they feel and share with her come down to the same primal motives that everything shares, in turn making her feel more one with everything around her.
…show more content…
A chicken can have its own subtleties that make it different from another chicken. To call a person a chicken is redundant, even if it is meant to be a derogatory statement about someone’s un-compliance or fear, a person doesn’t have the same motives or upbringing of a chicken. If a chicken could talk, it may handle something completely differently than what a person whom someone else calls a “Chicken” would do. The statement against somebody makes itself as a word of dominance or control over the other person. As humans we have dominion over a chicken, we own them, breed them, and kill them for sustenance at need, there’s not much a chicken can do to a person to stop us otherwise. This in effect makes names act as a way to control things around us, people or