초록 열기/닫기 버튼
“Compare and contrast” is a simple but effective device to engage students in critical thinking, analysis, and discussion in English reading classes. The difficulty lies in choosing literary texts for comparison. With the right coupling of texts, we can widen their interpretive horizon, each interrogating and enriching the reading of the other. This paper is a record of such widening of horizon by reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver along with Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Giver, the 1994 Newberry award winner and a popular choice in English reading classes in Korea, tells the story of Jonas, newly chosen as “The Receiver of Memory” in some post-Apocalyptic society, whose immaculately organized and seemingly egalitarian facade conceals a Foucauldian Panoptic regime. As Jonas and we the readers quickly realize, his task, though lionized as the eminently honorable one by all citizens, is no other than to serve as the designated scapegoat to bear in the stead of the community the burden of the painful memories of the entire past history. Joyous, free, uninhibited to the extent of anarchy, yet at the same time mature and civilized, the city of Omelas in Le Guin’s short story cannot be more different from the community in The Giver. Within a couple of pages, however, it turns out that this utopian city too has an ugly truth at its core: the citizens of Omelas live the life of perfect happiness on the condition that one and only one person among them—in the story, a little child incarcerated—suffer horribly. And yet a few Omelasians refuse to subscribe to such a deal. As the narrater concludes with an apparent air of incredulity, they are the ones who walk away from Omelas and all its happiness acquired at the expense of one lone child. When I assigned The Giver and “Omelas” individually in class, students in general supported the justice (and wisdom, as some of them added) of walking out of this seemingly utopian society; when we read them side by side, the same issue became only the beginning of long and fruitful discussions.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
reading together, scapegoat, Lois Lowry, The Giver, Ursula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
