The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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An analysis of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” In this assignment, I will be analysing the piece of text ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. I will be discussing the themes Utilitarianism and Exploitation in the text, and how these themes have an impact on the reader. Firstly, the theme Utilitarianism is shown throughout the text ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. According to www.dictionary.com, utilitarianism is ‘The ethical doctrine that conduct should be directed toward promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number of persons’. In short, this means that for an action to be morally right, it must benefit the greatest amount of people possible. When it doesn’t benefit the most amount of people possible, then the action …show more content…

In the text, it quotes ‘One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The other never come close’ which implies that some of the people of Omelas may believe that there is something wrong with the child, and this could also be backed up by the quote ‘It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective.’ This quote shows that the child may have been used to guarantee the towns utopian society, since the child could be exploited because it wouldn’t be able to understand what was happening to it. As the text was written in the 1970s, the term ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘defective’ could mean anything for dyslexia to cerebral palsy, and could be the reason that the towns people felt justified or were able to accept the exploitation of the child for the benefit of the town. ‘It lives on half a bowl of corn and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festering sores’ (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973) shows the condition that the child has been living in, so that the people of Omelas can the beauty of their town, further showing the exploitation that the town is willing to go too. In addition to trying to justify the actions of the town members, the quote ‘in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.’ shows the exploitation of the child, as the quote is stating that without this immoral action, the town would ‘wither and be destroyed’ which is using the child for their own

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