In the middle of a beautiful city, a magnificent Summer Festival is taking place, with delicious food, playing children, and a glorious parade. Everyone in town is celebrating, apart from one child. In Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas", a dark secret lies under the streets of an alluringly utopian town called Omelas. Moreover, Karl Shapiro's poem, "Auto Wreck" discusses the events of a devastating car crash, while analyzing the mechanical and biological events that follow. Although they differ in style, both works explore the themes of innocence and guilt as they question justice and morality.
Style plays a vastly important role in the narration of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In most basic terms, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story told in first person point of view, where the narrator is not a participant in the narrative. The most striking difference is that the story itself is told in two distinct parts, the first being depictions of the beautiful summer festival, contrasting with the second part, describing the horrifying conditions of The Child (“The Ones”). Furthermore, the narrator is unreliable in the fact that he or she does not have all the
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Furthermore, the way in which the story is told helps to make even the readers become a guilty party in the story: "not only are the residents of Omelas... complicit in the child's misery, but the narrator attempts to draw the reader in and make the reader complicit on some level as well" (Sobeloff). As the narrator invites readers to visualize their own cities, they become wrapped up in the story, and can become guilty themselves, should they begin to excuse the city's