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Diction In The Unknown Citizen

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Throughout the course of history, driven by greed for power and authority, rulers strived to create perfect societies or utopias. A prime example of this is Karl Marx’s version of a utopia: the proletariat or working class rising up and everyone being absolutely equal in society. But, figures like Vladimir Lenin poorly executed this and the utopia Marx wanted became a distorted version. Novelists, short story writers, and poets frequently wrote about utopias becoming dystopias. For example, in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas and The Unknown Citizen, Ursula Le Guin and W. H. Auden respectively convey an overarching theme: that perfect societies always have major kinks. They convey this theme by carefully choosing their diction, using vivid …show more content…

In The Unknown Citizen, W. H. Auden chooses his words extraordinarily. For instance, while describing a man a man in this poem, he writes, “in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint” (Auden 4-5). In this sentence, he juxtaposes the sense of new and old by writing the words “modern” and “old-fashioned” in the same sentence. He uses an old word to describe a new sense. Had he not included the “old-fashioned” phrase, Auden would have not given the reader a comparison of “modern”–the society about which this is written–and “old-fashioned”–a saint. Auden also showcases the theme, which is that perfect societies are far from perfect, in this microcosmic two lines. Furthermore, in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas, after describing the utopia of Omelas, Le Guin asks, “Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?” (Le Guin 16). By choosing to write a question about joy and the citizens instead of saying she was going to talk about the two, Le Guin is able to intrigue the reader so he/she is on the edge of the seat, eager to find out more about the citizens. Also, when she asks how one is to “tell about joy”, she creates a sense of doubt in the reader’s mind that this society is actually perfect–the theme of the story–simply by asking a

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