The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973

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Literary Devices

Allegory

Allegory is a form of literature that uses characters, events, and places symbolically to represent something else—typically, abstract concepts. It is closely related to parable, which is a short story that illustrates a moral. However, where a parable usually has only a single and relatively self-evident message, an allegory may have several layers of meaning, in part because each element of the story (for example, a particular setting) may have metaphorical significance.

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" straddles the line between parable and allegory, but its ambiguity ultimately aligns it more with the latter. Although Le Guin's story is on one level a thought experiment designed to reveal the shortcomings of utilitarianism, other readings of the story are also possible. The child, for instance, could symbolize any real-world person or persons whose exploitation secures happiness for another. Alternatively, the city could represent the frame of mind people adopt in order to cope with social injustices; in this reading, the people who leave Omelas do not necessarily represent people who physically leave a flawed society, but rather people who live in a way that prioritizes something other than personal happiness. Setting questions of human rights to one side, we could also read Le Guin's story as illustrating a psychological truth about human nature—namely, that it is only our awareness of suffering that makes happiness meaningful. Finally, it is worth noting that unlike a parable, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" does not communicate any single moral: readers may be uncomfortable with the existence of the abandoned child, but the narrator also stresses that happiness is a worthwhile goal, and not something to casually throw away.

Aporia

Aporia is a rhetorical device that involves expressing uncertainty and (often) asking the audience for guidance: in a play, for instance, a character might wonder aloud what he should do next.Aporia also appears fairly frequently in prose, particularly in first-person stories (since first-person narrators are not typically omniscient, they may have doubts about how to proceed, or at leastplausibly claim that they have doubts).

However, while "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is technically a first-person narrative, it uses aporia in a highly unusual way. The story's narrator never actually appears in the narrative itself, and she at first seems to be omniscient: the descriptions of Omelas in the first paragraph reads as if an all-knowing third party were simply relaying facts about the city. In the second paragraph, however, the narrator abruptly breaks off her account of the city to describe her uncertainty about how to capture the city's happiness: "How is one to tell about joy? Howdescribe the citizens of Omelas?" She then goes on to explain that she does not in fact know everything that there is to know about Omelas ("I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few"), and to invite the reader to participate in inventing the city ("Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids").

This unconventional use of aporia has several effects. For one, it underscores Le Guin's interest in the limits of belief and imagination: (virtually) pure happiness is so unfamiliar to us as humans that it eludes the narrator's ability to describe it. Second, it helpsensure that readers see themselves as morally implicated by the story. Narratively, we have helped to create Omelas, so we share the responsibility for the child's suffering (whatever we take that to represent in real life). Finally, the narrator's uncertainty places her on the same moral level as her readers. At the end of the story, for instance, the narrator admits that she does not know what it means to leave Omelas anymore than we do. This emphasizes the seriousness and complexity of the ethical issues at stake in the story, because even the narrator is not in a position to pass judgment.

Cliché

Although the term cliché is often used disparagingly to refer to writing that is unoriginal, it is possible for writers to use clichéd (overused) expressions intentionally and effectively. In "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the narrator quite explicitly draws attention to the fact that readers may find her descriptions of Omelas predictable: "Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights." In fact, Le Guin even draws on a series of clichéd phrases to evoke the kind of description she fears she is lapsing into: "Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time."

In one sense, then, Le Guin uses cliché expressions to communicate the difficulty of adequately depicting what it is hard for humans to even imagine: a utopian society. Any attempts to evoke real, near-perfect happiness end up sounding trite. It is interesting to note, however, that the detail that "saves" Omelas from the realm of cliché is the narrator's addition of the abandoned child. This makes the people of Omelas "credible," because we recognize suffering as a constant in our own world. Ironically, then, exploitation and pain are ultimately more widespread and predictable than even the "clichéd" happiness of Omelas.