Gifts by Ursula Le Guin: what is a gift when it comes to inheritance?

How to Read and Analyse a Novel: Analysing the Role of Inheritance

What has been passed down to you from the generations that came before? What do you want to retain, and what will you change, either for yourself or the generations after you? What might exist in you that you are not even aware of? Ursula Le Guin’s Gifts, the first novel in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, takes inheritance as its major theme.

Annals of the Western Shore was marketed as young adult fiction when it was first released back in the early 2000s. Whilst it could easily be read and understood by a younger reader, it features all of Le Guin’s usual sophistication and nuance as she explores a tangled and difficult theme, whilst still remaining eminently readable and enjoyable.

We follow Orrec, a young man from the Uplands. This place is bare and hard, and its inhabitants teeter on the edge of poverty. The lineage of each domain is defined by a “gift”, a power of some sort—denounced as witchcraft by the lowlanders—that allows each local leader to maintain their borders and protect their people. These powers range from the power to deafen and blind, to bend out of shape, to rein another to one’s will. And there is Orrec’s, the power of the undoing. Handed down from father to son, Orrec must decide what this inheritance means to him, and what he will do with his gift. Are there other avenues open to him, and what might they be? What does one do with the weight of such a responsibility? These are some of the questions we’ll be looking at today, as we dig deeper into this deceptively simple novel.