“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing” (Le Guin). Throughout the story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” author Ursula K. Le Guin has the narrator asking the reader many rhetorical questions that forces the reader to investigate their own thoughts, morals, or beliefs. This is often the case with short stories, which present questions in the form of a parable that shares a moral lesson with the reader. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” presents this challenge for us to find what is our happiness and what we will do to achieve this happiness, including ignoring issues of despair.
Imagine living in bliss. What would it be like? Le Guin, in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, …show more content…
In the final scene of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” some of the townspeople, both young and old, being so overwhelmed by the well being of the child and not being able to bring these feelings into Omelas, they choose to leave. Le Guin never presents us the reasons why these townspeople leave. However, we are told, “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” (Le Guin). The context of this statement leads the reader to believe that the people of Omelas pursue happiness in as a distorted truth in order to avoid the realities of suffering. Le Guin also implys that facing reality seems impossible for those who decide to ignore it, and those that leave decide to not hide from the unpleasantness of life, like oppression, hunger, or abuse. Instead from the compassion and understanding these people develop from seeing the despair of the child, they choose to use this knowledge with their defined happiness, to seek a more truer reality. Thus the people that decide to walk away take on a challenge to face the world for what it truly is, both with happiness and
Imagine living in bliss. What would it be like? Le Guin, in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, …show more content…
In the final scene of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” some of the townspeople, both young and old, being so overwhelmed by the well being of the child and not being able to bring these feelings into Omelas, they choose to leave. Le Guin never presents us the reasons why these townspeople leave. However, we are told, “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness” (Le Guin). The context of this statement leads the reader to believe that the people of Omelas pursue happiness in as a distorted truth in order to avoid the realities of suffering. Le Guin also implys that facing reality seems impossible for those who decide to ignore it, and those that leave decide to not hide from the unpleasantness of life, like oppression, hunger, or abuse. Instead from the compassion and understanding these people develop from seeing the despair of the child, they choose to use this knowledge with their defined happiness, to seek a more truer reality. Thus the people that decide to walk away take on a challenge to face the world for what it truly is, both with happiness and