37 pages • 1 hour read
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The narrator describes the setting of the story: a seaside city called Omelas, where the "Festival of Summer" has just begun. Music is playing, parades and processions are underway, and all the residents of the town seem happy and excited as they converge on the Green Fields. Here, boys and girls wait with their ornamented but unsaddled horses for a race to begin.The beauty of the weather and scenery match the mood of the city: "The air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air."
At this point, the narrator pauses in her description as she realizes the difficulty of describing Omelas’s happiness. The reader, she says, likely assumes that Omelas belongs in a fairy tale or a long-forgotten time, because "all smiles have become archaic." She then challenges the idea that happiness requires simplicity or even stupidity, explaining that the people of Omelas are "not naïve and happy children" but "mature" individuals living full lives. Their society, moreover, is modern in the sense that it is not a monarchy, though in other ways it looks very different from the world of Le Guin's readers: "They also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.
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By Ursula K. Le Guin