Adam

Adam is remembered as the first human to name the animals, an act that the book identifies as the first sign of his dominion over them. A story by Ursula K. Le Guin imagines that act being reversed: Eve persuades the animals to relinquish their names, then renounces the name Adam and his father gave her and leaves to join them.

Identity and the Act of Naming

The animals, in the account recalled by the narrator, were formed by the Lord out of freshly created earth. Adam’s first action with them was to assign each one a name. Naming is therefore not a minor detail of his relationship with the animals but its defining gesture: it marks the beginning of human dominion. The account also carries a more radical possibility—that until Adam named them, the animals did not exist. Naming thus appears both as an assertion of authority and as an act that makes the named visible within a human order.

Dominion and Its Costs

The discussion of Adam is framed by objections to calling animals pets, and even to terms such as owner or master. Those objections center on dominion: the claim that humankind possesses a God-given right to rule animals, understood by its critics as a form of enslavement. Adam stands at the origin of that claim in the biblical story. The narrator distinguishes between cats and dogs in this context, noting that domesticated dogs have been bred to be dominated and used by people, while cats are presented as resisting that same account of human control.

Eve’s Reversal

In Le Guin’s story, a woman who is unmistakably Adam’s partner, Eve, undertakes to undo his deed. She persuades the animals to give up the names they were assigned; the cats say that they never accepted their names in the first place. Once the animals are unnamed, Eve experiences the distance between herself and them as having fallen away. Without names to separate them, the distinctions between hunter and hunted, eater and food, also disappear, and she feels a new sense of oneness and equality with them.

Renunciation and Narrative Significance

Eve’s undoing of Adam’s act leads her beyond the animals’ names. She gives back the name that Adam and his father gave her, leaves Adam, and joins the animals who have freed themselves from domination by accepting namelessness. Her departure also entails relinquishing the language she shared with Adam; she explains that one reason for her action was that talk was getting them nowhere. Adam’s significance in this passage therefore rests less on a developed personal arc than on the deed that the embedded story makes contestable: naming establishes separation and power, while Eve’s renunciation imagines a different relation between humans and animals.