To place Le Guin's rhetorical use of myth in its broader context of American romantic/pragmatic rhetoric, I will first look at her fiction, particularly her science fiction, as a whole. As do most authors, Le Guin uses recurrent metaphors, symbols and mythic patterns, which, when considered as inherent in her entire opus, become rhetorical. Next, I am going to focus on selected recent stories to show Le Guin's rhetoric as progressive and evolutionary, much as her understanding of feminism is. In these more recent stories I feel the reader can see more clearly where Le Guin is now as an American ‘romantic/pragmatic rhetorician’ and whence she has come.

The idea of community and connection is an idea central to romantic rhetoric and pragmatism. The idea of community and connection is also a central metaphor in Le Guin's fiction. Coupled with community, as James Bittner says in Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, is storytelling's value ‘for acquiring and forming perception and vision’. Le Guin ties these two metaphors together in her Hainish universe and its history, in which the majority of her science fiction is placed. According to Bittner, Le Guin's Hainish history is ‘dialectical, an interplay between teleological3 and etiological myths’ – specifically the creation of the Ekumen, the all-encompassing interstellar human community, and that its creation is an end of human history. The stories themselves have as their ‘historical backdrop’ various times in this Hainish history and each serves either to advance humankind's progression towards a greater unity in community or to provide a point or points of beginning of this community: the Ekumen, the Hearth of Man, the Human Household.

The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, looked at together, are good examples of Bittner's dialectic between the teleological and the oetiological and the metaphor of community.