Story Skeleton—A Wizard of Earthsea

Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation—a desire to know what happens next. This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels.

 

By David Griffin Brown

 

A Young Mage Attends Wizarding School?

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a young mage attends a school of wizardry—a narrative conceit Le Guin pioneered decades before Hogwarts opened its doors. The novel follows Ged, the gifted son of a goat-herder on the island of Gont, who discovers his innate magical talent and trains under a sorcerer before joining the prestigious wizard school on Roke Island. In a moment of youthful pride and rivalry, Ged unleashes an otherworldly shadow that nearly destroys him. The rest of the tale follows his perilous quest to escape and ultimately confront the dark creature he has loosed upon the world.

Le Guin’s storytelling style gives the book the feel of myth or folklore. The prose is clear and poetic, with an almost archetypal simplicity. The narrative opens with a creation story epigraph and proceeds in the cadence of an age-old oral history. Yet Le Guin also subverts classic fantasy conventions—Ged is a poor, dark-skinned village boy rather than a noble-born white hero, and the ultimate villain is not a hellbent Dark Lord but something far more personal.

When A Wizard of Earthsea was first published in the late 1960s, modern fantasy fiction was only just beginning to gain prominence, especially in young adult literature. Instead of sprawling armies and epic battles, Le Guin offered an introspective, character-driven tale set in a non-European archipelago world. Early on, critics recognized its significance; the book won the 1969 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and quickly became a classic of both children’s and fantasy literature.

The Price of Power: A Taoist Bildungsroman

At its heart, A Wizard of Earthsea is a bildungsroman—a novel of formation tracing the moral and psychological growth of its protagonist over time. A simple coming-of-age story might follow a youth toward adulthood, but a bildungsroman carries the character through multiple formative stages toward maturity.

Le Guin structures Ged’s story across three arcs: his youth on Gont, his adolescence at the wizard school, and his young adulthood confronting the shadow he has unleashed. Each stage explores the consequences of ambition, the limits of power, and the Taoist principle of balance. As a young boy, Ged begins with raw talent and recklessness. In adolescence, his pride results in tragedy, scarring him and setting the course for the rest of the novel. As a young man, Ged journeys across Earthsea to confront the shadow and finally accept it as part of himself. (Quite a Jungian take, though Le Guin admitted she hadn’t read Jung before writing this book.)

Le Guin, a lifelong student of Taoism, built these arcs around the idea of equilibrium—the belief that light and dark, action and restraint, power and humility, must all exist in harmony. By the end, Ged learns that true power lies not in domination, but in self-knowledge and restraint.

Youth: The Coming-of-Age Arc

Stasis

As a child, the protagonist is called Duny. He is born in the village of Ten Alders on the island of Gont, famous for fisherfolk and wizards. After his mother dies when he is quite young, his father, the village blacksmith, raises him with a firm hand. As a quick boy who dreams of adventures beyond his village, he yearns for something more than a life at the forge. Thus, Duny’s stasis motivation is set—and this is the soil from which his narrative goal will grow.

Inciting Incident

Duny overhears his aunt, a witch, use a spell to command a goat down off a roof. Immediately intrigued, he attempts the spell on his own. Not only do the goats heed his call, they flock to him in haste—but then he can’t get rid of them.

The truth is now plain: Duny has the makings of a wizard. He knows it, and so does his aunt. But there’s also a foreshadowing here about the dangers of unbridled power and the need for wisdom. So here we have both his initial narrative goal (to discover what power he is capable of) and the theme of balance (power’s corruption versus wisdom’s restraint) that will play out across all three arcs.

→ See how a narrative goal is at the core of a reader's emotional draw.

Point of No Return

After his aunt frees him from the goats with another spell, he agrees to learn from her in exchange for a promise, bound by magic, never to repeat the words of power to his friends.

A hunger has awakened in Duny—a desire to learn, to grow in his magic. He cannot turn back. He is no ordinary boy, destined to mindlessly work the forge bellows. His dream of adventure now feels like it could become reality. 

Rising Action

Duny begins training under his aunt, and while he doesn’t always love the apprenticeship, it gets him out of his father’s forge, and it also sets him apart from the other kids his age. He relishes the mystique that his new power gives him, and as he excels at learning the true magical names of various animals, the other children nickname him Sparrowhawk for his ability to call birds from the sky.

Midpoint

Kargad raiders come to Gont, moving from village to village, burning and looting and murdering as they go. They will soon reach Ten Alders, so some of the villagers flee into the hills while others prepare to stand and fight.

Duny works with his father to make as many weapons as they can, even though the effort seems in vain. They are not a village of warriors. Indeed, they will need something more than steel to meet the Kargad threat. This marks a turning point in Duny’s childhood arc as he now has an opportunity to put his learning into action.

Rising Action Continues

The morning of the attack on Ten Alders, a cold fog clings to the hills. Duny is so exhausted from his work at the forge that he can barely hold a spear, so he searches for a spell to help his village.

Climax

As the Kargad warriors approach, Duny calls upon the fog with a spell a weatherworker taught him, and soon the village is thick with mist. While Duny holds the spell in place, his father gathers the other villagers, and they harry the invaders, attacking them from ahead and behind, using the concealed roads and alleys of the village to get away, and slowly leading them up to High Fall. The Kargads are tricked into running right over a cliff.

As the rest of the invaders flee, Duny collapses, drained.

Resolution

The powerful wizard Ogion the Silent descends from his home in the mountains to call the boy’s spirit back into his body. He declares that a great destiny awaits Duny. A month later, Ogion returns for Duny’s thirteenth birthday and gives him his true name: Ged.

Adolescence: The Tragic Arc

Stasis

Ogion becomes Ged’s first true teacher. His initial lessons are about patience, balance, and restraint, which Ged struggles to accept. Ogion warns that magic always carries consequences, but Ged longs for mastery, not moderation.

Inciting Incident

Serret, the daughter of an enchantress, goads Ged into attempting a forbidden spell from Ogion’s spellbooks. He nearly unleashes a dangerous shadow. Though Ogion intervenes, a door has opened both to darker powers and to Ged’s growing pride.

His experience fighting off the Kargads made it clear that Ged has power within him. His goal now is to learn the requisite spells that will make him a powerful mage. Since this is the beginning of a tragic arc, there isn’t much question that Ged will advance his skills as the story proceeds. More important than his goal is his fatal flaw: hubris. Thus we root for him to realize his hubris and avoid the darker path of pride and vanity. While there is emotional draw in his journey toward mastery, the reader can expect that a reckoning is coming.

Point of No Return

Ged leaves Ogion for Roke, eager to prove himself at the school of wizards. The choice marks the end of innocence and the beginning of his pursuit of power. The coming consequences of his fatal flaw are foreshadowed here—the ship he takes from Gont is called Shadow and the powerful wards that protect Roke initially resist Ged’s arrival.

Rising Action

He excels at Roke, making friends with Vetch but clashing with Jasper. Pride drives him more than wisdom. He studies the true names, illusions, and summoning spells. His pride is bolstered by Ogion’s assertion that he has the potential to become one of the greatest mages of all time.

The rivalry with Jasper escalates. Ged boasts that he can outdo the older student, even with less training. The two of them agree to a showdown in front of their peers. Ged brags that he will summon a spirit of the dead.

False Victory & Tragic Climax

Ged proves his power, but at great cost. The spell rips open the boundary between life and death. A formless shadow leaps through, nearly killing Ged before the Archmage Nemmerle seals the breach, giving up his own life in the process.

Resolution

Ged survives but remains unconscious for months. When he finally wakes, he’s scarred and humiliated. Nemmerle’s death allows him to finally see the cost of his pride. He has disrupted the sacred balance and loosed an evil force into the world.

→ Compare the structure of Ged's tragic arc to Winston's in 1984 or Dorian's in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Young Adulthood: The Redemptive Arc

Stasis & Inciting Incident

When Ged releases a shadow into the world, he reaches the end of his tragic arc while also kicking off the next quest. So the shadow-summoning scene is at once a climax and a catalyst. However, his narrative goal doesn’t crystallize until he recovers from the attack and fully realizes that he must take responsibility for what he has done—or die trying.

The stasis for this arc, then, is his initial recovery. Ged regains his strength and struggles to finish his studies. His injuries plague him, and his power is not what it once was. Still, he must earn his staff and face the consequences of his actions.

Point of No Return

Once Ged has completed his education and earned his staff, he accepts a wizarding assignment in the small community of Low Torning. He knows he must eventually confront the shadow, but he doesn’t yet know where he might find it—or if it will find him instead.

Rising Action

Even though Ged can sense the shadow searching for him, he must first focus on the reason Low Torning requested a wizard. A dragon from Pendor has been sighted in the area, and it has some hungry fledgelings. This is the first of two episodic adventures marking the early rising action.

He confronts the dragon at Pendor, slays its offspring, binds it by guessing its true name, but refuses its offer of power over the shadow. With that threat met, his responsibility to Low Torning is fulfilled, so he leaves to draw the evil that hunts him away from the community.

The shadow finally finds Ged. It herds him toward the Court of Terrenon, where he is taken in by Serret, the enchantress girl who once goaded him into reading Ogion’s spellbooks. But there are terrible powers here, ancient and evil, that present even more danger than the shadow. In fact, the shadow has driven him here in the hopes the Terrenon will enslave him.

Midpoint Reversal

Ged escapes the Terrenon by turning himself into a falcon and flying to Ogion’s home on Gont.

His old master advises him to stop running. This marks a turning point in his quest, and it counts as a reversal since his narrative goal has shifted. Instead of fleeing the shadow, Ged becomes the hunter.

→ See how a midpoint can be a powerful force for raising stakes in the second act.

Rising Action Continues

Ogion gives Ged a new staff, and down in the village of Re Albi, the young wizard trades protection spells for a boat. He then tracks the shadow across islands and storms, with the shadow now running from him.

Eventually, Ged arrives in Iffish, the home of his friend Vetch. Ged explains everything that has happened and Vetch insists on joining him for the final stage of his journey. They set out together and sail to the edge of the map.

All Is Lost

When they stop at the Port of Astowell, Lastland, Ged realizes where the shadow is headed. It is trying to make its way back to the Dry Land, the realm of the dead. If it crosses over, Ged will have lost—and be lost. The imbalance he has created in the world will become permanent. They have squandered precious time in pausing here. The shadow has almost reached its destination. With this ticking clock to amplify the final stakes, the two wizards head due east.

Climax

They reach World’s End, the border between Earthsea and the Dry Land. The boat runs aground in a silent place. There is no wind, no sun. The shadow is there, walking away from them across the sand, so Ged sets off in pursuit, his staff glowing as bright as a star.

The shadow approaches Ged, formless at first, but then taking on the shape of a man, first appearing like his father, then like Jasper, then at last a writhing monster. He lifts his staff high as they come face to face, speaking the shadow’s name as the shadow speaks his own: Ged. “Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.”

Resolution

The wizard and the shadow collapse, so Vetch jumps out of the boat and runs over to his friend, but as he does so, the veil between Earthsea and the Dry Land dissolves. Vetch falls into the ocean, swims back to the boat, then rescues Ged.

Together, they make their way back to Iffish in silence. At first, Vetch isn’t sure if his friend has succeeded or if it is the shadow sitting in the boat beside him. But when the moon rises, Ged stands and declares that he is free—that he is whole. He has not bested the shadow but absorbed it back into himself. The balance, within and without, life and death, light and dark, has been restored.

POV

A Wizard of Earthsea announces its point of view in the opening lines:

The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. From the towns in its high valleys and the ports on its dark narrow bays many a Gontishman has gone forth to serve the Lords of the Archipelago in their cities as wizard or mage, or, looking for adventure, to wander working magic from isle to isle of all Earthsea. Of these some say the greatest, and surely the greatest voyager, was the man called Sparrowhawk, who in his day became both dragonlord and Archmage. His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made.

The novel adopts the voice of an unnamed chronicler, someone compiling the life of Ged from songs, histories, and collective memory. This storyteller never becomes a character, but the presence is constant—an authoritative voice shaping the tale as a mythic history.

The effect is a powerful, balanced omniscience. The narration follows Ged almost exclusively, yet we’re never filtering directly from his consciousness. The narrator veers outward when needed, offering context, history, or commentary that is external to Ged’s direct experience. It provides brief insights into others—especially Vetch in the final chapter—without ever feeling like headhopping.

This creates a distinctive tone. The voice feels objective, measured, and informed from a future perspective—someone writing long after Ged has lived, died, and passed into legend. The storyteller knows the songs and the Deed of Ged, knows how the boy Sparrowhawk will become Archmage, yet recounts only the early trials that shaped him.

This is an example of omniscience used with precision. The voice never slips into deep third. The consistency of this mythic narrator allows the world to feel vast and old while keeping Ged’s journey centered—a crafted history rather than a personal confession, told with the calm authority of a storyteller who has gathered the tale from many tongues.

→ Read more about the evolution of POV in contemporary fiction.

Conclusion: A Legacy Beyond its Time

When A Wizard of Earthsea appeared in 1968, it immediately stood apart. The language was elevated. The story asked much of its audience—about power, ambition, balance, and the shadowed corners of the self. In spite of this complexity, it was shelved as a children’s book. In the 1960s, publishers did not demand the narrow marketing categories we see today. A novel with big themes and serious consequences could be shelved without issue next to stories about talking animals or teenage sleuths. YA as a concept had not yet hardened into a set of expectations about age, theme, or voice.

Le Guin’s novel became a cornerstone of YA fantasy, a book that has influenced generations of writers and opened the door to stories about wizard schools, coming-of-age quests, and morally complex heroes. However, by today’s industry standards, A Wizard of Earthsea might struggle to find a publisher willing to call it YA. There’s the mythic voice. The long passages of solitude and travel. The refusal to give readers a single age-specific slice of adolescence. The focus on philosophy and failure rather than romance or rebellion. These elements break many of the rules that now define what is “permissible” for a young adult book.

That contradiction is part of the novel’s legacy. Le Guin shaped the YA fantasy genre while never quite belonging to it. She proved that young readers can handle complexity and ambiguity, and that a children’s story can be rich in language and ideas. Half a century later, A Wizard of Earthsea still feels groundbreaking: a paradigm shift more than a product of its time.

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David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. His debut novel, When the Sky Breaks, was released in 2025. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.