She Unnames Them

Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names.

Two pages. Eve systematically removes names from all animals. Cats deny ever having accepted externally-chosen names. Dogs compromise by giving up breed designations while keeping individual names. Eve returns her own name to Adam, who barely notices.

Without names “functioning as barriers, the animals seemed far closer than before.”

Alicia Ostriker called it a “counter-parable” — Le Guin inverts the Genesis hierarchy where naming is dominion. Unnaming is liberation. The story enacts the argument that naming creates distance, not intimacy.