{"id":1657,"date":"2019-11-11T00:05:05","date_gmt":"2019-11-11T05:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/?p=1657"},"modified":"2019-11-11T00:05:05","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T05:05:05","slug":"omelas-and-the-lottery-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/2019\/11\/11\/omelas-and-the-lottery-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Omelas and the Lottery"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas<\/em> is a short story I had heard of in comparison to the Lottery<\/em>, but never got a chance to read. Because of this, the twist was spoiled for me, but it really didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the story at all. I really loved the casual unreliability of the narrator. I also liked that the narrator just came out and said imagine Omelas one way or another way, it doesn’t matter. Scene setting isn’t the purpose of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas<\/em>. What is important is the situation of Omelas. In that respect, the story also (probably intentionally) contradicts itself by criticizing those who only notice suffering and then only going into extreme detail on the suffering of the child in the base (that was hard to read and imagine). Everything else about Omelas is up for open interpretation except for this poor child’s situation.<\/p>\n

Another very interesting aspect of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas<\/em> is what the speaker says people have to think about the child in order for them to be okay with it. “They begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a very little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy” (page 6). This explanation is dehumanizing to the poor child, the people of Omelas cease to view “it” (and the speaker refers to the child as “it”) as a human being! Don’t you just love groupthink? I was so mad when I read that.<\/p>\n

The townspeople of the Lottery<\/em>‘s justification for their violent ritual is even more flimsy than Omelas’. They are just creatures of habit, completely unable to change their ritual because it’s been done for so long because they are afraid of what will happen without it. Really it seems like they hardly think of stopping it. This is why, in my opinion,\u00a0 The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas\u00a0<\/em>is better at explaining this phenomenon of people forgetting their humanity, because it talks about (and is named after) those who\u00a0can’t. The Lottery<\/em> hints at this by mentioning other towns, but (and maybe it’s because I’ve read this story too many times in high school) the point doesn’t strike as well as it does in Omelas<\/em>. What do y’all think?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short story I had heard of in comparison to the Lottery, but never got a chance…<\/p>\n

Continue readingOmelas and the Lottery<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4117,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/ldst1010304f2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}