As he begins to navigate Urrasti society, Shevek continually makes comparisons between the beauty of Urras and the desolation of Anarres. Though skeptical of Urras, Shevek is bewitched by its outward appearance. “This is what a world is supposed to look like,” Shevek says to himself while looking out the window on his first morning on Urras. As Shevek grows disillusioned both with his secret admiration of Urras and his preconceived notions about the society in which he was raised, Le Guin uses his internal conflict to show that there is, in truth, no such thing as utopia.

The Urrasti idea of utopia-characterized by wealth, luxury, and excess-is very different from the Anarresti ideal of a society founded on principles of equality, communal living, and rejection of the ego. However, when Shevek visits Urras, he sees that the upper echelons of Urrasti society also consider themselves to be living in a utopia. Anarres was conceived as a utopia by its founders, and Anarresti society rests entirely on the collective belief that their utopian experiment has been a success. As the story of The Dispossessed unfolds, Le Guin-through her conflicted but hopeful protagonist, the Anarresti physicist Shevek-highlights the ways in which utopia is a complex and perhaps unachievable ideal.

The dispossessed an ambiguous utopia