October 21, 2023 would have been Ursula K. Le Guin’s 94th birthday. On October 25, 2023, the winner of the second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction will be announced. Ahead of the award announcement, we’re reflecting on some of Le Guin’s works in a series of blog posts: Le Guin and Her Legacy. Interested in some of the authors Ursula inspired? Click here to see the titles nominated for the prize, as well as titles by the judges!
Spoiler warning: Given how short this story is, and how integral the title is to any discussion, this post will discuss in detail the events within. If you have any interest, I highly recommend reading the story before continuing with this post. Content Warning: The subject of this post is a story that contains child abuse and neglect. (If these are subjects you are not comfortable reading about, you might check out these animal live cam feeds for something lighter.)
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was originally published in 1973, in a collection of short science fiction stories from various authors. It was republished in Le Guin’s 1975 “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters,” and has since been widely published online and in other short story collections.
In the introduction to the story, Le Guin says on being asked about the title, “‘Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin?’ From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?” referencing her penchant for reading signs backwards; in this case, Omelas = Salem, Oregon.
We are introduced to Omelas during the Festival of Summer, as processions of joyous people pass through the streets of the city on their way to the Green Fields. In the city of Omelas, everything is wonderful. Which is not to say everything is perfect, but close to it. The narrator invites the reader to imagine the city as they will, however they may imagine a utopian city, with or without technologies of the modern world. The narrator stresses repeatedly about the good life of the people of Omelas: “How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naïve and happy children — though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched.”
The narrator is not only omniscient in this story, but perhaps omnipotent as well, seemingly creating the city as the story goes on: “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical… For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city?” Le Guin is inviting us to imagine this utopia, to partake in its creation through our reading of it, to be complicit in what comes next.
“Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.” What follows is a description of a child, locked in a windowless room in a basement underneath one of the beautiful public buildings, or perhaps one of the spacious private homes. The room is small, with dirt flooring, a couple of dirty mops, and a rusty bucket. The child “looks about six, but is actually nearly ten.” It lives in the darkness by itself in the locked room, “except that sometimes — the child has no understanding of time or interval — sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear.” The description of the child goes on, and it is hard to read about the conditions in which the child lives.
The twist of this story, such as it is, comes in the next paragraph: “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, other are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”
The children of Omelas are introduced to the child between the ages of eight and twelve. Initially, they are incredibly upset at the state of the child, at their powerlessness to help it at all. But as time goes on, most children begin to accept their inability to change the system. They understand their shining city comes at a cost, one they and others have decided is worthy of the joy and happiness of everyone else. It is never explained how or why the child being kept away and neglected means health and well-being for everyone else, but is that not part of the status quo? It’s always been this way, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
The remarkable thing comes in those that choose to leave, to break the cycle, to not continue perpetuating a system of oppression. Sometimes it is the children, other times it is an older adult. They leave their homes, their friends and family, the life they’ve known, the life of happiness and joy. “They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Many of us have had to, or will have to walk away from Omelas, whatever that may look like for us. Jobs, relationships, families, situations that seemed too good to be true because they were. Ultimately the question we have to ask ourselves is, what is the price on our happiness and comfort, and who is paying that cost?
