In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines the origins and purpose of storytelling through a feminist, ecological, and anthropological lens. As a explanation for the prevalence of the hero-centric narrative tradition, she supposes that the first stories derived from the stories of ‘the Hunt’ – replete with action, heroes and happy (that is, meaty) endings:
The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…. No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank white Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.
As a counter to this, she proposes that the earliest human tool was not a weapon like a spear or club, but a container: a carrier bag used for gathering food. There is some anthropological evidence to support this. This simple shift reframes the central metaphor of human culture from one of conflict and conquest to one of collection, nurture, and interconnection.
Le Guin critiques the “killer story,” the prevailing structure of Western storytelling built around a (male) Hero who acts decisively, violently, and always at the center of the narrative. In this story, human progress is depicted as a sequence of dramatic, often bloody victories—each a strike of the spear. This story dominates literature, history, and myth, reducing human experience to conflict and erasing the everyday lives, labors, and relationships that sustain society.
Instead, Le Guin offers up what she calls the “carrier bag theory” as an alternative model for narrative: one where the shape of the story is not an arrow but a bag. A bag can hold many things—objects, people, meanings, contradictions—and does not require a linear, violent climax. In this model, story becomes a container for shared experience, for the slow gathering of moments, tools, memories, and meanings. The novel, especially, she argues, is well suited to this form. It can be messy, subtle, meandering, and deeply human.
Le Guin identifies herself as a writer who brings a carrier bag full of “wimps and klutzes,” beginnings without ends, strange failures, and people who don’t understand. She sees this not as a flaw, but as a reflection of the true fabric of human life: full of ambiguity, transformation, and mutual care.
Le Guin and Story Design
To Le Guin, story is not essentially about conflict, victory, or heroes. It is about life—about the acts of gathering, holding, sharing, and sustaining. Stories should reflect the relational, the everyday, and the sacred acts of survival and connection that traditional hero narratives ignore or trivialise. She argues that we need new stories—or, rather, we need to revive the older, often untold stories of domesticity, creation, care, and complexity.
Le Guin’s story is not the myth of the conquering hero, but the tale of people gathering wild oats, watching newts, telling jokes, and singing to children. These are not footnotes to history; they are its substance. Her theory urges us to abandon the supremacy of the spear and embrace the humble, life-affirming power of the bag.
In doing so, she opens space for a different kind of fiction—one that mirrors the actual, lived reality of human beings, in all its strangeness, softness, and interconnectedness. A story that enlivens, not kills.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1989)
The House of Nerdery and Curios 