The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas By Ursula K. Le Guin

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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short story written by an American author Ursula K. Le Guin. Also, the author won several awards like the Hugo and Nebula Award. Her winning novels (The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974)) are extraordinary. Furthermore, the story titled The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is about a child and his/her sacrifice for the society for their happiness and sickening bargain that is needed to be maintain. As the narrator describe it, “Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time” (Le Guin 106): Omelas is a fictional city made by the author. Moreover, a child “could be a boy or a girl […] It is feeble minded […] or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect [...] It is so thin there are no calves to its legs […] Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually” (108). Also, he/she is in a room that is locked and has no window: “The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch […] The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room” (108). Sometimes, someone is coming in the room and kick the child just to get it up. Some other day the child will speak to them in the hope …show more content…
Everyone in Omelas knows about it. Some of them have even come to see him/her, “others are content merely to know it is there” (108). The narrator mentioned that the adolescents will go home while in tears or in rage. Also, she mentioned that somebody (adolescent boys or girls and man or woman) who has seen the child decide not to go home. They leave the city and go towards the mountain, “the ones who walk away from Omelas”

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