Omelas Themes

A theme is the heart and soul of the story. It is the very foundation of a story that reflects that main character’s experiences, as in “Aguantando” or their thoughts and actions, as in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. The intended moral of the story as well as the conclusion or point of view of the author is expressed through the theme. It is the glue that binds all the other elements of a story such as setting, characters, plot, tone, etc., altogether. The goal of this paper is to show the importance of the element of fiction theme in any given story. In the story of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin, there are a couple of themes to point out. The first one is moral. This is something that can be tied to human decency. The city of Omelas was a utopian setting with joyful citizens. But there is one suffering child imprisoned in the basement in one of the beautiful public buildings of the city (Le Guin par. 8).

Although most of Omelas was fine with this idea for as long as they remain happy, some were not. With that comes our second theme – leaving. Those who couldn’t stand the thought of the suffering child left the city, never to return again. The place they leave Omelas for is a place “even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness… it is possible that it does not exist… but they seem to know where they are going.” (Le Guin 4). That decision once again goes back to the first theme – human decency. These two themes go hand-in-hand. For those people who have morals, they chose to leave despite the fact that this new path they are about to take may not even exist. By doing so, they are standing up to something rather be another by-stander to the child’s misery. In Junot Diaz’s Aguantando, holding on is the theme. Nine-year old Yunior narrates the story about his family, and his mother mostly, still holding on to the idea that his father would come home one day. Although the narrator doesn’t have a