Omelas Prep

 Here you go grade 12s! Find quotes to support these topic areas. These are not the essay topics but your essay topics will be connected to them.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.

• Our Imagination as a vehicle for Complicity: As the narrator invites the audience to create an image of Omelas, we become complicit in the moral consequences of its greatest crime: the agreement to allow a child to continue suffering in order for everyone else to be happy. By reading this story, Le Guin pulls us in to its creation, generating consensus and understanding of our circumstances.
• Coming of Age and the Loss of Innocence: All children between 8 and 12 learn about the child in the basement. At this discovery, the narrator states that everyone is disgusted and horrified at first. 
• The utilitarian scapegoat. A child suffers in a basement somewhere in Omelas so that thousands of citizens can live in bliss and comfort. Evaluate the pleasures of Omelas' citizens in light of the suffering that this child must endure. 
• The absurd pleasures we desire. Many pleasurable behaviors described in Omelas come across as bizarre. Motifs such as nudity, music, drugs, and plenty of contradictions populate Le Guin's narrative.