The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Literary Analysis

• What are the characters’ emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? What do these indicate to the reader about the character?

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” the narrator describes a beautiful utopian society. Nonetheless, the reader quickly learns that there is something much darker about the society and the reasons for its beauty. Throughout the description of the utopia, the reader is given hints of flaws within the society (drugs, drinking, etc.). All of the minor flaws that are foreshadowed to the reader in the beginning lead into the major flaw that is later found out -- the scapegoat. The scapegoat, or the person who all the minor flaws are blamed on, is the child who is locked underneath the city. However, the point of view the story is told from is what particularly leads the reader to the theme. If told from a different point

of the story through the characters and their actions or gestures. These actions are visible in

Alienation, starvation, neglect and abuse are all words that invoke unfavorable connotations and are treatments that no person would ever want to be subjected to. Living in those conditions is something that most people choose not to think about let alone witness with their own eyes. By not seeing it, they find it easier to pretend it doesn’t exist. In the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula Le Guin writes about a city that from the outside looks like the perfect utopian society – a rich culture that is full of laughter, joy and peace, devoid of any violence, poverty or social inequities. Beneath the surface though hides a very dark secret that bares the true nature of Omelas. The citizens of this ostensibly flawless

Having each story been written in a third-person narrative form, the reader knows the innermost feelings of the

Hurst uses the mood of the story to convey the character's’ feelings and tells the audience, indirectly, how to feel emotionally

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

In an interview, Duff Brennan said something along the lines of "All literature shows us the power of emotion. It is emotion, not reason, that motivates characters in literature." Duff Brennan is communicating that a story is constructed and carried out by the emotions of the characters. In real life, we're ordinarily guided by reason. Most people usually have to stop and contemplate about how doing something will affect them, they don't just act based on how they're feeling. Individuals typically do what is fair, not let their emotions take control of them and drive them to make regretable decisions. In literature, the characters follow their hearts, despite their consciousness trying to reason with them. Even when the characters are not following their hearts, they are ruled by emotions. In most books, characters don't instantly follow their hearts so that the book becomes one where the character is internally struggling over reason and their emotions. Books have to be this way to keep the readers interested. Otherwise, it would just be a book about people going about their normal life, doing what they should do, what's right to do, not what they want to do. 1984 by George Orwell and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green both support this quote and show how this quote is valid.

For instance, in the No Se Echa a Perder article two groups of men in completely opposite positions bond over food and the idea of not letting it go to waste. The repetition of the phase “No se echa a perder” attempts to stick in the reader's head, the same way it did to the author, Francisco. The fact he willingly wrote this article and that this memory stayed in his mind over time, shows that no matter what position of authority someone is in, they can connect to the person with less power. The common ground of food symbolizes how greatly a small shared interest can affect someone's overall mood considering the men in questioning were shaking with fear before they found a connection to each other. The use of emotions is also very apparent within The Border Patrol article, but in a completely different way. After a brief interrogation, the agent pulled out a dog to look for contraband and the author noted she “Can’t forget the expression in the dog’s eyes”(Silko419). Giving the reader a visual image in their head of a dog being forced to work with an agent, pushes the readers to believe that even the dog can sense how harsh it’s owner is. This visual successfully leads many readers to believe that border patrol agents are abusing their power, so much that even their own dogs fear them. While the authors both attempt to get the readers into an emotional state, they also try to gain

The storyline and characters help the reader understand that The

Looking through a psychological lens, readers can better understand the significance of why the characters do the things they do and how concealing the truth can

Not only do the roles of the characters compel a reader, they also illustrate the

Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a plotless, philosophical fiction. Written in 1973, Le Guin tells the dark narrative of a fictional town which lives in peace with itself. The seemingly happy town houses a dark secret, one so dark that citizen’s of the town leave to escape it. Ursula Le Guin does this by using authorial intrusion, withholding information, and encouraging her readers to think.

The citizens come to the consensus that nothing can be done for the child, and nothing should be done. To help this one miserable child would lead to the suffering of an entire city, after all. This is what the narrator persuades us to think. She uses many methods to prove her point. For instance, she tells us that if the child were to be saved, “in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.” (1552). She defends the people of Omelas, who are not heartless, cruel, mindless “simple utopians,” but instead as passionate, intelligent, gentle people capable of sympathy. However, they understand that “the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars…the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” (1552). Not only this, but she asserts that the child is too “imbecile” to recognize love anymore; it has grown too used to the darkness of the cellar to ever revert back to normal civilized life. At every turn, she finds a way to argue against compassion and in favor of causing pain; she portrays the assessment the Omelasians make of the child to be so logical and responsible that even the reader starts to buy into it. Why help the child? There is no point, is there? Continuing this abusive treatment of it is for the good of the order, isn’t it? The narrator makes it extremely easy to

relate to the characters’ feelings, by providing vivid descriptions of the setting, as well as