Ursula K. Le Guin

and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” connect deep below the surface. Understanding the Bible will help readers understand Le Guin's short story. Ursula Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” creates an allusion of finding the christian faith through--the child in the darkness, the city guarded by beautiful gates, and those who leave and never return. In Le Guin’s utopia, every citizens happiness is at the cost of the suffering of a child. This child is locked underground and…

In both Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Ursula Le Guin’s, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, there is a town in which a person is sacrificed in one way or another in order for the entire community to thrive. These sacrifices are rituals which only these towns know about. “The Lottery” focuses more on an actual ritual where the town draws papers from a box and one person ends up getting stoned in order for the crops of that year to thrive. “The Ones Who Walk Away” from Omelas is a story…

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Schrödinger’s Cat is a science fiction short story from her short story collection, The Compass Rose (1982). Schrödinger’s Cat begins with a narrator who does not identify by gender or name explaining the world in which he/she lives. A nearby couple is overheard having a breakup, yet in this unexplainable world, they mean it literally as the woman turns into a heap of body parts, with the man reduced to pieces hopping around. The most agonizing aspect of this world is that it…

In the text, Le Guin uses Omelas to represent Americas political morality. The child represents the poor and lower class in the United States, as well as Americas perception of third world countries. “They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence,that makes possible the nobility of their architecture...They know that if the wretched one were not there snivelling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young…

Author of the short story Mays’ Lion Ursula Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, the child of the renowned anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber who was a well-known author. In 1951 Ursula studied, and received a B.A. at Radcliffe College. She then received an M.A. at Columbia University in 1952. After being awarded the Fulbright Fellowship, she traveled abroad for a year to study in Paris. While there, she met and fell in love with Charles Le Guin, a historian, and they…

Upon A Time”, by Nadine Gordimer, “The Wife’s Story” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the motion picture Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, all share a common underlying theme, which concludes to be, protect who and what you love, however, the authors seem to possess diverse views relating to individuals and society. Each of the works…

Award-winning author and feminist Ursula K. Le Guin delivered a rhetorically complex speech to the Mills College graduating class of 1983, comprised almost entirely of women. Her speech came at a challenging time for women, as second-wave feminism began to dissolve into a myriad of disagreeing factions. The title of the speech, the “Left-Handed Commencement Address,” is a reference to her book The Left Hand of Darkness, which follows an androgynous race of space aliens. This foreshadows the…

An Analysis of Identity in Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them” The interpretation of language can have powerful consequences. It can open one’s mind to new perspectives. It is possible that Ursula K. Le Guin is trying to introduce new points of view in “She Unnames Them”. She is depicting the significance of individuality to female audiences, in particular. The story is arguably told from the point of view of Eve from the Book of Genesis. She goes to every type of animal trying to convince them…

1. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, the theme of violence is portrayed through the shadow, Ged, and the dragons. In Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451, the theme of violence is portrayed through the war, the firefighters and the society. 2. “For he hungered to learn, to gain power” (Le Guin). Le Guin has Ged saying this near the beginning of the novel to show that Ged really wants to gain supremacy over others. This is emphasized later in the novel when he attempts to…

Happiness is a complex concept, and a state most people strive to achieve. Ursula K. Le Guin presents a unique take on achieving happiness in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Concepts of similar philosophical values are prevalent throughout several pieces of Le Guin’s works. Elizabeth Anderson addresses the themes commonly seen in Le Guin’s writing in her article “Ursula Le Guin and Theological Alterity” when she states: “Her standing as an author and her long years of complex engagements…