Happiness In Omelas

Something Called Life
What is happiness? “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. LeGuin, is a story in which everybody would see it as a brutal and horrific story of a kid who is being incarcerated for his/her whole life as an exchange of all the goodness and happiness of the city. However, the narrator lets us know the misunderstanding concept of happiness that the Omelas people have, and how vague and profound this feeling can be for certain people who are living in a “Fairy tale city.” As the story goes along, the irony, parallelism, and persuasion that the narrator is giving to the story shows how elusive happiness seems to be for the people living in Omelas, and the selfishness they can have when it comes to pursuing their “happiness.” Irony is well

In fact, as the narrator describes Omelas’ festival he mentions a kid as, “A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune.” This is one of the paragraphs in which the unhappiness of a kid even on the outside world seems to be obvious and somehow related to the kid who is living in the cell. As a matter of fact, the narrator describes what could happen if the kid who is living in the cell was released, and he clearly made a comparison in between these two kids. The narrator explains, “Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in.” Hence, the narrator uses parallelism to show the fact of the kid, who is playing the wooden flute, as a reflection of the incarcerated kid; as they both reflect darkness in their