Teaching Compassion in “The Lottery” and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Abstract

This study explores how to teach the relationship between compassion and violence, studying Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Urusula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” These two short stories reveal the selfish nature of humans to keep their own safety and well-being and to ignore the injustice of violence that kills the person with the stone in “The Lottery” and confines the child in the basement in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” First, while reading these stories, students should understand the characteristics of the subjective and objective violence that Slavoj Žižek refers to: to study how people perpetrate subjective violence according to their desire to be safe in society and to figure out how objective violence manipulates people to inflict subjective violence on the weak. Second, students will recognize that these two stories lack a feeling of compassion and a feeling of suffering that arises from human being’s vulnerability, the perception that we are not free from violence, and that we can always be in a position of weakness like Tessie Hutchinson in “The Lottery” and the child in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In other words, students have to understand we cannot separate ourselves from the weak who suffer from violence caused by human selfishness and should think about safe spaces for the weak because the place that these members of society feel comfortable is truly good for our place. Therefore, this study emphasizes how to develop compassion through reading iterature.