ENGL 1F95 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Radical Change, Simile, Holocene Extinction
26 Apr 2016
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Ursula k. le guin the ones who walk away from omelas (104) This is the story of a parade, a festival. It goes from one end of town to the other. That is all that happens in this narrative. While the parade moves, however, we are introduced to a complex philosophical and moral problem. We are invited to interpret omelas as an allegory (a story with both a literal meaning and a secondary meaning or meanings, often political): the narrator invites us to consider the story allegorically. It presents a direct address; a moral question; and a riddle for the reader (not the characters). But doing so in this case reveals that this is not a typical short story in any sense. In fact, it denies the illusion of a real fictional world: the fiction exists only and exclusively in the reader"s imagination. They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy.
