Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
The Dispossessed: Introduction
The Dispossessed: Plot Summary
The Dispossessed: Detailed Summary & Analysis
The Dispossessed: Themes
The Dispossessed: Quotes
The Dispossessed: Characters
The Dispossessed: Terms
The Dispossessed: Symbols
The Dispossessed: Theme Wheel
Brief Biography of Ursula K. Le Guin
Historical Context of The Dispossessed
Other Books Related to The Dispossessed
- Full Title: The Dispossessed
- When Written: Early 1970s
- Where Written: Portland, Oregon, USA
- When Published: 1974
- Literary Period: Contemporary
- Genre: Science fiction
- Setting: The twin planets of Urras and Anarres
- Climax: Shevek reveals that he has developed the science to support a technology which will allow for instantaneous, telephone-like communication between worlds far away from one another within the same galaxy.
- Antagonist: Egosim; capitalism; Sabul, the leader of Shevek’s syndicate
- Point of View: Third-person
Extra Credit for The Dispossessed
Destroyer of Worlds. The character of Shevek was, according to Le Guin herself, based heavily on the real-life figure J. Robert Oppenheimer. An American physicist who was among the scientists behind the Manhattan Project (the government program to develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II), Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita in order to describe the feeling of watching atomic bombs explode over Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In the novel, Shevek has a similar power as a physicist whose theories of time and simultaneity contain the potential for revolutionizing—or decimating—relations between his galaxy’s many warring worlds.