Direction Of The Road By Ursela Leguin

Ursela LeGuin’s Direction of the Road is a short story detailing the primary events of an Oak tree’s life. The Oak tree creates a bridge into their own world for the reader by using speculative fiction to help provide insight on their perspective. Throughout the paper, Leguin anthropomorphizes the Oak tree by giving them common human characteristics so the reader will realize that the Oak tree can conceptualize and has feelings. The discourse of the story follows a linear trend that reveals the plot as the story progresses. The narrative is told from the Oak tree’s perspective, which allows for the reader to access the protagonist’s internal thoughts. Fr example, the oak tree states “For I am not death. I am life: I am mortal” (LeGuin 274)

Immobile organisms, like the Oak tree, are non-humans that experience events through internal realities. The Oak tree, who appears to be nameless, focalizes their experiences on their interactions with the nearby environment such as animals, humans, cars, and the construction of a nearby road. For example, the oak tree gives attention to a passing car as they state: “I observed this one with attention. I approached it at a fair speed, about the rate of a canter, but in a new gait, suitable to the ungainly looks of the thing: an uncomfortable, bouncing, rolling, choking, jerking gait” (LeGuin 269).
By focusing on objects that pertain to its proximity in relation to the tree, it demonstrates that the Oak tree is most concerned with objects that are capable of affecting their life. The Oak tree provokes its readers to have empathy towards itself by anthropomorphizing itself in a variety of ways. The Oak tree states “I had learned the basic trick of going two directions at once” (LeGuin 270) which demonstrates that they have the ability to learn, an attribute many people only give to humans or animals. In addition to this, the protagonist relates itself to “a family of rigid principle and considerable self-respect” (LeGuin 268). By doing so, the tree uses characteristics that are commonly relatable to human nature to invoke the reader to empathize for the tree without having the reader forget

By using specific imagery to provoke the reader’s thoughts on how the Oak tree lives, the reader becomes more intrigued on their life. For example, as the car crashed and approached the tree, it was forced “to leap directly at it” (LeGuin 273). The purpose of this statement is to personify the tree by relating an action, uncommonly associated with a stationary object, to the tree. LeGuin’s use of defamiliarization attracts the reader’s interest because it creates interest in a nonhuman being represented through a human act. In addition to this, with the construction of a nearby road, the tree reveals one of their human-like tendencies which is the capability to move around the