Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a short story detailing the existence of the fictional utopian town, Omelas, and the dark secret it contains. This secret being that the society keeps a suffering child starved and locked away in order to ensure Omelas prosperity. Le Guin poses a stark contrast between the societal happines and the torture of the child in order to present the audience with a moral dilemma that asks one question: is it truly moral to put the good of all above the suffering of one? Le Guin begins the story by describing Omelas as a utopia. The audience is taken…

Toni Morrison employs the use of ambiguity and the absence of explicit racial markers to explore themes of identity, memory, and the complexities of race in her short story “Recitatif”. The story follows the narrator, Twyla and her friend from childhood, Roberta as they navigate their lives and each other. Morrison makes a point not to specify which woman is white and which woman is black, encouraging the audience to form our own conclusions founded from our own biases and what we have been taught about race.  Twyla and Roberta first meet at St. Bonny’s, an orphanage/group home that the girls have been assigned roomates in. We are first introduced…

In “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, jazz music is used as a motif to explore themes of identity, community and the power of artistic expression. The narrator is introduced to what jazz music can do by his brother, Sonny, who is a wanderer and suffers from a heroin addiction that the author is unsure how to help with. At the location of their mother’s funeral, the narrator is first introduced to Sonny’s love for jazz when he asks him what he wishes to do with his life. Rather than Sonny striving for something “practical” with his life, he wishes to pursue being a jazz musician. The narrator has trouble understanding…

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, Walt Whitman makes the case that we are all connected through a web of life on our public transportation journeys together. While I was skeptical when I first approached the poem, I found that Whitman has made a good case. Not only are passengers aboard a common mode of transportation, they all share the same goal of arriving at their destination. Whitman writes “ The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,   The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every       one disintegrated yet part of the scheme” which I took to mean that no one is…