She also explained the story’s subtitle, “Variations on a Theme by William James,” noting that she was inspired to write the story by something James, an American psychologist and philosopher, stated in his “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”: “ kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the faroff edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment.how hideous a thing would be when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.” Although James believed people would not accept such a bargain, Le Guin presents in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” a society that does just that so that she can explore the reasons why people avoid or renounce moral responsibility. Le Guin once wrote in a preface to the story that it is a critique of American moral life. One of the major themes in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is morality. Although all of the citizens of Omelas are aware of the child’s situation, most of them accept that their happiness is dependent on the child’s “abominable misery.” Sometimes, however, a few people, after visiting the child and seeing the deplorable conditions under which it lives, leave Omelas forever. Le Guin’s classic short story is of a Utopian society whose survival depends on the existence of a child who is locked in a small room and mistreated.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |