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The narrator functions as a character in the story due to the fact that they seem to be actively creating Omelas while they are telling their tale. Describing the city serves as an act of invention. While relaying details about Omelas, the narrator presents those details as if they just occurred to them, and each detail serves to flesh out and expand upon the city’s utopian characteristics, answering (unasked) questions on behalf of what the narrator assumes to be a dubious audience. The more the narrator describes, the more they reveal about not only the city, but also their relationship to the audience they hold in thrall. The narrator comes across as an imaginative storyteller eager to convince a group of skeptics.

The narrator stands out for their use of the second person in telling their story. They acknowledge an audience while describing Omelas, and they ask questions of the audience before and after revealing Omelas’s conditions for the suffering child. In doing so, the narrator acts as a conduit between the fictional city of Omelas and the real world inhabited by the audience, rendering the audience complicit in Omelas’s making, and therefore also the child’s pain and suffering.

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