The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Literary Analysis

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In a 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” describes a peculiar city where the inhabitants’ prosperity depends entirely upon the endless suffering of a single child, locked away in a cellar. The townspeople ignore the child’s pleas for release because they have learned that his salvation will destroy the utopian society where they live. Many modern societies have similar function to the ones express in the story is not stringently structured as what is seen in Omelas. A child is not literally locked in a closet. However, the story does work as a metaphor. Even through there are no utopian societies in the world today, the United States function on the same principles as the ones express in the story. The author of the story…show more content…
In Omelas capitalism is the economical system at work. The bourgeoisie uses the proletariat in order to live a better life. This is essentially what takes place in Omelas. The androgynous child effectively represents the proletariat who sits in a room and lives a filled with misery, while the townspeople live a life filled with happiness. The key to Omelas and the present day United States is that the bourgeoisie believes their happiness is neither necessary nor destructive, but also knows the proletariat or other poor classes live in horrible conditions. Much has been said and written about a system that allows a super-minority to control a vastly disproportionate share of its vast resources. People do not make the connection that they themselves are the cause of the…show more content…
All people know of the problem, and some chose to ignore it, and attempt to forget about it. These are the people in the United States, who know there is poverty, but still live lives of excess in an ignorant fashion. There are those people who stare at the child for days, but do not act, representing the people who acknowledge the problem, look it in the eye, but lack the leadership to attempt an institution of change. There are those who kick and abuse the child, representing the multibillionaires who utilize child labor in foreign countries, and pay their employees close to nothing. And there are those who look at the problem, and then begin to run away from it. These are the people who do not want to give an effort to change the society, but instead want to magically find a new one. Rather than walking away, we can join together and demand that our nation’s first priority be to protect and empower those in
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    town of Omelas appears to attain perfection, with its residents in a perpetual state of glee, much unlike the drab landscape we live in today. Through this small town, Ursula Le Guin forms a narrative on a society that has progressed far beyond the present. The apparent perfection of Omelas, as well as its hidden fatal flaw, allows Le Guin to shock the reader with a sudden revelation, which puts into question the possibility of a perfect utopia. In Le Guin’s short story, The Ones who Walk Away from

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