The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Literary Analysis

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The 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 Omelas, Le Guin describes a small, yet perfect town. Any possible desire exists in Omelas, from public transportation to drugs and passion. But as the town’s celebrations reach their peak, Omelas’s dark secret is revealed: Inside one of its most ornate buildings hides a small child, who has grown in a world of endless misery and fear. This child’s suffering provides the happiness of the rest of the town, and without him Omelas would lose its joy, devolving into a town not unlike one today. Omelas’s initial state not only represents a progression towards a perfect society, but directly compares to society today, suggesting that Omelas could more specifically represent the progression of communities today. Le Guin states that in society today, “Only pain is intellectual,…show more content…
Rather than accept a world built on misery, they leave Omelas in search of a world without grief. Their abandonment of Omelas represents the hope for a perfect society, something that also applies to the present. In their search for a better town, they show that perfection in society is out there somewhere, and that we only need to look for
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    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

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