Ursula Le Guin Short Story

Ursula Le Guin’s message of her short story is that humans are selfish and will do anything for their own happiness. She conveys this message through creation of different moods and her descriptive language.

In the beautiful city of Omelas there’s a horrible dark secret. There is a basement under a beautiful building that “has one locked door, and no window…the floor is dirt...the room is about three paces long and two wide.” (21) There is a small, tiny room in the “beautiful” city. In that basement “a child is sitting...it could be a boy or a girl...perhaps it was born defective…” (21) There is a little child, who is refered as “it”, in a tiny basement all by itself. The child is like a thing because it’s referred as “it”. The child is

The child is also described as “so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes...its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores.”(21) The child never eats and it’s so skinny. In the basement “the door is always locked, and nobody ever comes…” (21) Nobody even comes to check on the child. It was just so lonely and nobody even thought about it or how it was doing. Sometimes people would come but they would “ kick the child…” (21) The only reason people came was to hit the child. hitting the child pleased the people of Omelas. Some people didn’t understand why the child was there but “they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars. the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” (21) The people’s happiness

The people were having lots of fun. In the streets “one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful fait sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.” (19) The city could be imagined as a lively place to be. People are gathered together all happy and having a lot of fun. The people of Omelas are described as “not naive and happy children - though their children were, in fact, happy. they were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wrecked.” (19) The people of Omelas almost seem like perfect people with perfect lives. Omelas is described “like a city in a fairy tale.” (20) Supposedly, Omelas is a fairy tale type city that is just so perfect and happy with perfect people. It’s disgusting how the people act all happy when EVERYONE knows that there is a lonely, hungry, defective child in a tiny little basement. It’s