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Summary Of Ursula Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas'

Decent Essays

Discovery is inherently a challenging and transformative process that predicates personalised enrichment, broadening one’s perception of self and the world governing them. This is evident in Robert Gray’s poetic anthology Coast Road: Selected Poems (2014), as “The Meatworks” (1982) and “North Coast Town” (1985) congruently explore the transience of nature in commercialised societies, and expose the abhorrent reality of industrialisation. Similarly, Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973) captures the culmination of humanity’s immorality in the provocative discovery of human sacrifice, presenting substantial psychological and ethical dilemmas. Therefore, both texts reveal the didactic nature of discovery, whereby adversity ultimately expedites our understanding of the human condition. [112] The transformative capacity of discovery testifies to the indispensability of capitalizing on seemingly detrimental confrontations to refine discernment on social practices. The hellish setting of the “Meatworks” is vicariously exemplified in the synaesthesia of “the hot, fertilizer-thick, sticky stench of blood,” denouncing the industrial indifference to scruple shown in the degenerated standards, facilitating the confronting discovery of humanity’s culpability. Gray criticizes the consumerism of the late 20th century as he delineates the extent of Australia’s flourishing consumerism and avarice, where “working with meat was like burning-off the live bush

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