At the end, it turns out that what we thought was evil was really a part of the hero himself. In that way, it's a lot like Le Guin's other works, which tend to avoid simple moral victories. In fact, it's sometimes hard to even know what's good and what's evil in the first place. But in A Wizard of Earthsea, it's not so easy to defeat evil. Take this example: you know how in many fantasy stories, we have good and evil fighting, and (hopefully) good wins in the end? Gandalf (and team) fights Sauron, Aslan defeats the White Witch, and Harry Potter takes care of Voldemort – all great. That's a pretty serious change to the fantasy story, but Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea makes several other interesting changes to the old fantasy standards too. In her story, this wizard childhood isn't terribly pretty: Ged will one day be wise and kind (and bearded), but when he's young, he's reckless and proud and gets into some terrible trouble that follows him and nearly kills him. In Earthsea, Le Guin takes a wizard who will one day be immensely powerful, and she shows us what he's like as a teen and a young man. Are they born like that? Or do they start out as regular kids who have to learn how to be wise and grow beards? This curiosity on her part turned into the inspiration for A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin wants to know where all these old men with long white beards and immense wisdom come from. Now imagine this: it's 1968, practically eons before Harry Potter, and Ursula K.
Back then, when someone said "wizard," instead you likely pictured an old man with a long white beard and immense wisdom – you know, someone like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings. Before the first Harry Potter books came out, if someone said "wizard," your mind probably didn't pull up the image of a teen at a boarding school. To understand A Wizard of Earthsea, we have to start by imagining what the world was like before the Harry Potter books (we know, tough to imagine).
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