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Point of view plays an important role in the story by engaging the reader and thereby drawing the reader into the story and the complex morality at play. The story begins in a typical third-person style of narration with the description of the Festival of Summer. After this introduction, however, the narration shifts from storytelling to a kind of philosophizing. The narrator addresses the reader and seems to “think aloud,” working through different possibilities about Omelas and what might and might not exist in the utopian society. This shift in narration signals that the piece is not a story in the traditional sense. Rather, it is an allegory and a thought experiment about a place called Omelas, and the narrator is building the world in real time. The narrator uses the conditional tense, asks rhetorical questions, and inserts their own point of view into this world-building exercise. This unusual narrative style has the effect of engaging the reader in a collaborative process of building the world of Omelas along with the narrator. The effect is all the more important when the information about the suffering child is revealed. Because the narrator and the reader have built the world together, the reader is now implicated in the horrible moral trade-off along with the citizens of Omelas. In addition, the end of the story is somewhat of an open question: who are the ones who walk away from Omelas and where are they going? The point of view compels the reader to become more invested in the answer to this question as well as the thorny moral implication of the Omelas they have just imagined.

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