The Critique of Ethics, Mediocrity and Complacency in Márquez and Le Guin’s Fictions

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is published by the Nobel laureate novelist Gabriel García Márquez and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is authored by Ursula Le Guin who is known primarily for her works of science fiction. While the genres and the tones of the sample works chosen and discussed in this study markedly differ, their thematic trajectories and the way they criticize society and public morality is argued to resemble considerably. In the fictional world of the stories, both Márquez’s winged-man and Le Guin’s miserable child are mistreated by the members of their societies the fact of which relates us the stories’ undercurrent concerns of the critique of society, moral complexity, complacency and mediocrity. While the winged-man is abused as he is unfamiliar and does not comply with the cultural and religious expectations of the society, the child is exploited and degraded for the selfish prosperity of an entire community. In bringing together two different generic and unsettling fictions and reading them critically, this study aims to demonstrate and argue how complacency, mediocrity, thought patterns of society, folk wisdom and superstition are entangled with far-reaching variables of culture, politics, economics and even religious-capitalist theodicy.