Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Literary Analysis

Dystopian literature is, with a few exceptions, bleak and societies depicted often lean towards an Orwellian type of oppression. In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (TOHWW) we can observe a different type of oppression, one where people are not trapped by barbed wire and the thought police, but by their own inhibitions and their inability to digest a harsh reality. This creates a system where everyone seems to be a free and willing participant, even though they are slaves to their own pleasure and fear of suffering. Even though Omelas is seemingly free from many of the real world’s problems, there is a palpable tension, an unnerving feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with the city as a whole. This feeling of unease is brought on by the near perfection of Omelian society and its single, horrible secret. In other words, it is the contrast created by the citizen’s fanfare …show more content…
It is in turn this tension between appearance and reality that makes The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas a fundamentally dystopic short story. Instead of facing reality and accepting suffering as a fundamental part of life, the people living in Omelas only experience pain vicariously through the child. Those who visit the scapegoat recoil at the very sight of his suffering, unable to cope with the festering martyr at their feet. Most return to their home shaken but ultimately content in their well-being, ignorant that they contribute to the façade and farce that is Omelas. These people are so enamored with their daydream of a utopia that they fail to see a stark truth lying right before their eyes. No one realises that they are failing to grasp one of the most basic aspects of human existence; that you cannot know true pleasure until you have experienced great pain in the pursuit of