Similarities Between The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas And Good Old Neon

Realizing Truths in the Fictional Stories “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin and “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace. In “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin and “Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace, the reader is able to form a comparative relationship between the worlds in the stories and their own. In both stories, the reader is able to find truths about their own world through the fictional ones expressed in the stories as they are shown through the characters and the societies in which those characters live. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “Good Old Neon” both cause the reader to ask themselves questions about their own lives and the society in which they live, leading the reader

One of the questions the reader asks themselves while reading “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is whether or not they would be one of the individuals who walk away from Omelas, or stays and lives in the beautiful city despite knowing about its dark and inhumane characteristic. In the story, some of the citizens of Omelas leave the city because they cannot live with how their society is run and how it obtains its beauty. These individuals “go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates” (Le Guin 428). Much like the characters in the story, the reader is made to questions the ethics of the city and whether or not the end justifies the means. Through the reader asking themselves whether or not they would stay in Omelas, they begin to realize how much they are or are not like certain characters in the stories and begin to further discern their beliefs about right and wrong and how far they would go to achieve

In Wallace’s story, Neal states that he goes “from being someone who [is at Church] because he [wants] to wake up and stop being a fraud to being someone who [is too] anxious to impress the congregation with how devoted and active [he is] that [he volunteers] to help take the collection, and never [misses] one study group . . .” (Wallace 157). This is also shown through Neal’s previous love of baseball, and how by the age of fourteen, that love had “disappeared and turned into worrying about averages and if [he] could make All City again, or being so worried [he’d] screw up that [he did not] even like ironing the uniform anymore before the game because it gave [him] too much time to think” (Wallace 156). Reading about Neal’s anxiousness to impress others causes the reader to wonder whether it is a societal norm to try and be seen as “perfect” in their own society as well as causes them to wonder if society sets expectations individuals believe that they need to live up to. In Sparshott’s journal article “Truth in Fiction”, Sparshott states that “there is no other possible way to imagine a world than to manipulate one’s memories” (Sparshott 5). When reading fictional stories such as “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and “Good Old Neon”, in order to manipulate