Juxtaposition In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

The short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, written by Ursula Le Guin, is about a so-called perfect society where the sacrifice of a child is what provides harmony, equality, and prosperity to the citizens of this city. As a reader, one is invited to create and visualize their own utopia, so that one is emerged with the reality of a moral dilemma: the happiness of many for the unhappiness of one. The symbol represented in the story reflects current and past society issues such as military sacrifice, slavery, and injustice.

In the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin the theme is that in order to be truly happy, one must stand up for what’s right, even if it means leaving everything that they know. Society creates traditions and ways of thinking that are not easy for everyone to follow. In Omelas, the citizens have the choice to ignore the suffering of a child locked in a cellar, or leave the life and the city they are familiar with. The people of Omelas must ask themselves whether it is better for a child to suffer for the city’s happiness and wealth, or should the city suffer, just to give the child a shot at happiness? It is ironic because Omelas is a

From the beginning of time, society has made the “moral” perspective the desired response or reaction to all situations and scenarios. The term moral means concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior, and the integrity or dishonesty of human character. To be morally sound, one must address the true meaning and purpose of morality. In the story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” citizens often leave due to the reality of their society. The ones who walk away from Omelas are cowards, not “moral” heroes of any manner. By leaving Omelas the former residents are abandoning the child to suffer in Omelas, its bitter reality, which involves no one changing the course of its life.

In “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin, the informally-speaking narrator depicts a cookie-cutter utopia with perpetually happy citizens that sing and dance in the music-filled streets during the Festival of Summer. However, under one of the beautiful public buildings lays a child, no older than ten years-old, who lays in its own excrement. Although the citizens know the emancipated child is there, they refuse to act upon the child’s suffering, for their happiness depends entirely on the child’s abominable misery. Through ethos, the narrator illustrates this utopian society with a casual tone and frequently asks the audience for their input. Le Guin’s fairy-tale introduction of the story establishes her credibility through her extensive knowledge and understanding of the people of Omelas. Le Guin utilizes logos through the narrator’s second person point of view which incites the audience to draw their own conclusions about the city of Omelas and question their own justifications of the child’s existence. The concept of the happiness of many relying on the necessary suffering of one forces the reader to question their own morals and their justifications for the child’s physical and mental condition. Through ethos, logos, and pathos, Le Guin presents the contrast and divide between the citizens of Omelas and the child in the cellar in order to challenge the reader’s capacity for moral self-conception.

The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas is a short story written by Ursula Le Guin. In her story, Le Guin creates a model Utilitarian society in which the majority of its citizens are devoid of suffering; allowing them to become an expressive, artistic population. Le Guin’s unrelenting pursuit of making the reader imagine a rich, happy and festival abundant society mushrooms and ultimately climaxes with the introduction of the outlet for all of Omelas’ avoided misfortune. Le Guin then introduces a coming of age ritual in which innocent adolescents of the city are made aware of the byproduct of their happiness. She advances with a scenario where most of these adolescents are extremely burdened at

Oppositely, the child from “Omelas” is kept in a secluded place away from the rest of society. The child remains locked up in a cellar in a basement that has a dirty floor, mops, a rusty bucket, and no windows. Unlike Mrs. Hutchinson who has a family, the child remains isolated from the citizens who follow the rule: “there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child” (246). The child is described as “defective,” “imbecile,” and is often referred to as “it,” (245) rendering him cretinous and sexless. The people of Omelas’ happiness comes from the beauty surrounding them, their friendships, and their wisdom (245). The child, however, is surrounded by filth, lacks human contact, and has become degenerate. Therefore, the child lives a truly unhappy life compared to the other citizens of Omelas.

LeGuin states that those who leave the town of Omelas “walk ahead into the darkness” (8), which further conveys how unfathomable this unknown place is

Even though there is an abundance of detail in “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, the vagueness of this story allows it to be pulled from its pages and

In the story, while the author is describing joy to the reader she says that “All smiles have become archaic.” (p.1par.2) This shows that the joy has been around longer than anyone can possibly recall, that these people know no other expression than to smile. With the logic that to have joy in Omelas there always has to be a child to suffer, but the point is that this suffering has happened so long that the Omelians just assume that it has to happen. Because of the time that this “tradition” has survived it has become entwined with their culture. The ones who know why this must happen are likely the caregivers of the child and the ones who have to find a new child when one dies/ grows up.

Additionally, this is an unmistakable act of evil and selfishness made by the people of Omelas to let such a horrid event occur, the suffering of one child for the happiness of all, which is the devil’s bargain in this story (Scoville 2016). Thus, the main inquiry concerning this is why must the town of Omelas be built this way. One reason that the narrator abandons an ideal perfect story world and goes into one full of evil instead is due to the notion that evil is interesting to individuals and that readers want to hear about such brutality like a child be inhumanely treated (Scoville 2016). However, this idea is overly generalized and does not apply to everyone (Posella 3). Another reason may be that, in relation to real life, even though the world may seem perfect, people still suffer. While the majority are aware of this, they still continue on with their lives as long as they are happy, doing nothing to help others, thus, reflecting this view of life demonstrated in the narrative gap. Consequently, in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, these questions were required to be purposely left unanswered in the story, as a means for the reader to want to analyze the text in search for the hidden messages within the story, in this case being about life. Furthermore, Samuel Beckett also achieves this in a similar way, using lack of closure in “Waiting for Godot”, however, with a slightly different perspective about life being conveyed.

Most people learn in their youth a rather disappointing truth about reality that is best expressed in the words of a popular proverb: all that glitters is not gold. Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” reminds readers that sometimes things really are too good to be true. The city of Omelas is cunningly portrayed as the embodiment of a utopian society; however, ironically the roots of this seemingly perfect community seem to be firmly planted in a foundation of evil. The unceasing happiness, intelligence, and health enjoyed by the citizens of Omelas are only able to exist because a single orphaned child is kept in absolute solitude and misery in a basement below the sunny streets of the city. Through the use of the allegorical utopia Omelas, Le Guin urges the reader to explore the principles of morality in a way that can directly be applied to real world contexts and inspire change.

All of these words correlate with the critical lens approach that is being conveyed. The article, in abstract, is described as, “The author critiques the short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (Variations on a Theme by William James)" by Ursula Le Guin, focusing on the story's depiction of a utopia where the society's happiness is exchanged for the suffering of one child. Tension in literature, metatextuality, and the theme of ritual sacrifice are discussed, as well as morality and allegory in the

The positive connections and similarities between the speaker and his professor creates a positive and happy tone while the negative connections in The Ones Who walk away from Omelas creates a critical

“William James’s Lost Souls in Ursula Le Guin’s Utopia”, is an academic journal article written by the author, Linda Simon. The article was published as a feature scholarly journal by the John Hopkins University Press’s and was written for philosophy and literature. The article contributes to the study of literature because it showcases an example of comparative literature. In this instance, Simon analyzes Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” to the argumentative essay which inspired Le Guin's short story, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” written by William James. By comparing the two texts, author Linda Simon analyzes the differences in moral and ethical codes in hopes to provide justification and reasoning for the decisions that the citizens of Omelas make to either stay or leave despite knowing their society is built upon a dark foundation.

Stories are often very similar to each other even when the creators have no intention of doing that. This happens to be the case with Dead Poets Society, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and the poem Unknown Citizen. These three pieces of literature take place in a world that is completely different from the world we live in currently. The short story and poem are similar to utopian society/world. Utopian is described as a world that is perceived as perfect or idealistic.