A World of His Own: Intellectual Propertarianism, Individuality and the Ansible in The Dispossessed Ethan T. Waters College

Ursula K. Le Guin’s cyclical chapter structure in The Dispossessed exemplifies the idea that particular events throughout Shevek’s life and upbringing on Anarres shaped his understanding of later experiences on Urras. Of these events, Shevek’s initial experience of solitude and private egoization in his single room in Abbenay had the most significant impact on his later understandings of Urras. When Shevek is relegated to his single room, he begins to understand his ideas as his sole property, which hints at his eventual acceptance of Urrasti principles of individuality through intellectual propertarianism. Shevek ultimately creates the ansible as a result of his isolation at the Institute in Abbenay, in which Sabul coercively limited his social interaction. When he reaches out to the Terran ambassador, Keng, to spread the concept for the ansible, he acts as a sovereign nation of ideas, which is significantly influenced by his first experiences in his own room.

Shevek is at first apprehensive of his living situation when he discovers his single room in the dormitory. Annaresti principles seem to oppose all that his isolation stands for, though Shevek eventually admits that “[p]rivacy, in fact was almost desirable for physics as...