Utopia: An Analysis of the Lottery and Thesis

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Utopia:

An Analysis of the Lottery and the Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

George Orwell once wrote that, "Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness." In Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walks Away from Omelas, the truth of this maxim is made manifest through gripping tales of what price a utopian society is worth in human suffering. Both authors create ideal societies where inhabitants are materially satisfied and happy, yet underpinning this comfortable lifestyle is a horrible fact which harkens back to the primitive and violent nature of humanity. This shared moral framework in the book forces the reader to question what decision they would come to in order to live in a utopia as well as what choices they are making to live in their own society. The stories do have significant differences. The decision of some individuals to resist the barbarity of their "utopian" society in Omelas is contrasted the family which kills its own mother in The Lottery.

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This difference reflects differing perspectives by the authors regarding human nature.

There exist significant similarities between Jackson's The Lottery and Le Guin's Omelas in regards to what reasons are made to justify the terrible truth about their social order. Both stories have an inherent focus on violence. In The Lottery, the author tells us that, "Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones." This quotation distills the lottery down to is essence which is violence ignoring all the trappings of tradition, ritual, and history. Furthermore, the quote shows how what really matters to the villagers is the avoidance or questioning of change. Similarly, in Omelas, the author writes, "Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every….....

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