They
keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the
beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one
goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass
down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out
into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the
mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness,
and they do not come back. Page 82
I choose this passage to analyze because I feel
like the title of the short story is resolved or at least comes together a bit
more through this passage.
This is the first time as readers that we see
first hand, who in their right mind is leaving the “joyous” city of Omelas. At
this point in the story, we are also grasping why someone would want to leave. The
entire first half of the plot discusses simply how amazing Omelas is. On page
74 there was a particular section that made me stop and think the second time I
was reading, “There has never been such a resoundingly happy place to live.
There is no crime, no war, and even the drugs are harmless. But how is it
possible for any place to achieve this level of easy delight? And at what price
does it come? Or more importantly: if you lived in Omelas, would you be willing
to pay it?” When I read this at first, I was not phased by it much at all. The
second time however I could not help but notice how it seemed as if the
narrator is trying to convince the audience to live in the happiest place.
Something I did not take into consideration the first time was that it seems as
if she is trying to bribe her audience into living in Omelas. She says that
life will be great and it’s the happiest place ever… but what would you do to
be able to live here? At what price does this happiness come? And is it worth
it? The last question of that quote, “Or more importantly: if you lived in
Omelas, would you be willing to pay it?”, directly relates to my passage. The
people who are not willing to pay for Omelas are the one who ultimately leave
and never return.
In the passage I chose, we meet these people
who are leaving Omelas and never coming back and the reason for this is because
they have been brought into the room without light or windows to see the child
held down there. Omelas is a town that is composed of this perfect life with
people who are always happy and joyous though not naïve. This is all fake and
superficial however, because all of the people of Omelas know that there is
this starving, deformed, depressed child hidden from all of the city so that
they can live their perfect lives. The people, who walk away from Omelas, are
real people in my opinion. With real hearts and emotions and feelings. These
people were not cut out to live in Omelas from the beginning and that is
perfectly all right. The world isn’t perfect and neither is the life of anyone
living in Omelas.
I'd love to see you come back to this after our class discussion. Do you still think of Omelas as fake? I could imagine someone arguing that our own lives in the US, then, are just as fake, since they depend on the pain and labor of many people around the world...
ReplyDeleteI want to correct my wording a bit, when I said that "this is all fake and superficial" I mean that although the physical place, Omelas is real, the people who choose to stay in Omelas are un-phased by the child and therefore heartless.
ReplyDeleteTo put it in your terms professor, yes I could argue that the lives we live are "fake". I am actually very glad you commented this because it can be argued that we in society are exactly like those who choose to stay in Omelas. I think that a lot of times in day-to-day life, people pass by others not caring about anything but themselves and what they are doing. The people of Omelas who stay are blatantly ignoring this helpless child, when in real life humans are not so different. When walking down the street and you see someone who looks homeless asking for money you rarely see anyone helping them out. We walk by the homeless everyday un-phased because that sad fact is that we are used to it. In a human health class I am taking this semester, we learned about an 18 year old who was standing on a bridge about to jump to his death and not one person stopped to ask if this man who was hysterically crying on the edge of a bridge needed help. The high school student even took the bus there and he said that although he was very clearly distraught on the bus, no one did anything or said anything. It really amazes me sometimes that people are just in their own worlds and unwilling to help. It’s really terrifying to think that we can compare our own world to the fictional world of Omelas.