37 pages • 1 hour read
Ursula K. Le GuinThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Needs of the Many versus the Needs of the Few
As terrible as Omelas’s treatment of the abandoned child is, the narrator is adamant that there is a good reason for it: through an unknown bargaining process, Omelas has traded the happiness of this one individual for the happiness of all the rest of society. This happiness, moreover, is not just a matter of sensual pleasure, but of scientific, cultural, and social progress that greatly surpasses anything that exists on Earth. The narrator says, for instance, that Omelas may have everything from fuel-less power to a cure for the common cold. War definitely does not exist, and society is so peaceful that there is virtually no need for laws. Even humanity's relationship with animals seems different; the horses are so happily tame that riders use no equipment but a "halter without bit."
In terms of sheer quantity, then, the well-being that results from the child's imprisonment more than cancels out the child's own suffering; its "abominable misery" secures everything from "the health of their children" to "the abundance of their harvest." "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" therefore poses a challenge to the philosophical position of utilitarianism, which typically holds that morality is a matter of doing the greatest possible amount of good for the greatest possible number of people. This account of ethics tends to strike people as plausible at first glance, because well-being seems like something we should try to maximize. As Le Guin's story demonstrates, however, there are a few potential problems with utilitarianism as a basis for moral decisions. Because it focuses on the sum total of happiness, for instance, utilitarianism does not necessarily guarantee the happiness of any particular individual (and, as in this story, may sometimes actively require a particular individual's misery). Relatedly, utilitarianism does not necessarily take into account factors other than well-being, including the ideas that individuals have rights and that treating people ethically is partly a matter of respecting those rights.
With all that said, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" stops short of fully condemning utilitarianism. The stakes are high in the story, because freeing the child could result in the suffering of many more people: "To throw away the happiness of thousands […] that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed." Perhaps for that reason, the people who cannot tolerate the child's suffering simply leave, rather than trying to change the system Omelas relies on: arguably, it would be immoral to deprive the other citizens of their well-being without their consent. Furthermore, while the narrator clearly respects those who do leave, she does not sugarcoat the decision and even implies that it may be a misguided one, saying that it is "possible [their destination] does not exist." In other words, Le Guin depicts the rejection of the happiness of the community in favor of a personal moral code as a courageous but deeply uncertain act.
The Relationship between Suffering and Happiness
The narrator of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" initially describes the city as a place of unlimited happiness, though she admits that this kind of utopia is difficult to imagine, much less depict. At first, she suggests that this is because our ideas of happiness are confused and limited: "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid."
She implies that this smug defense of suffering is in part a result of the age we live in, perhaps because it contains so much visible unhappiness (e.g., "the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb"). Whatever the origins of the "bad habit," though, its upshot is that we find it hard to imagine "mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives [are] not wretched," because we think that if they truly were intelligent, they wouldn't be happy. The narrator therefore tries various methods to make the people of Omelas real to her readers, inviting us to fill in the blanks and clarifying that by "happiness" she does not mean naiveté: sex and drugs are freely available in Omelas, but without the negative consequences attached to them in our own world.
Eventually, however, it becomes clear that Omelas’s happiness is not perfect, and not only because the abandoned child itself leads a life of misery. The residents of Omelas all know about the child, and that knowledge initially causes them extreme distress: "These young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence." Although these feelings typically pass in time, they quite clearly are not part of what we usually consider "happiness," which raises the question of just how Omelas is a utopia.
The narrator has an answer to this question, however: "It is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives." In other words, it is not simply that the child's existence makes Omelas’s happiness physically possible; it also makes it psychologically possible by deepening the emotions of Omelas’sresidents beyond what pure happiness would allow. In other words, happiness—at least as the narrator describes it—can only exist if suffering also does, because qualities like "compassion" and "poignancy" appear to require an awareness of pain. It is not ultimately clear, however, whether this interdependence of happiness and suffering reflects a basic fact about the world or simply a fact about human psychology. Perhaps it actually is possible for happiness to be rich and meaningful in the absence of suffering, even if we as humans cannot imagine what that would mean.
Moral Action and the Limits of the Imagination
When the narrator first interrupts her description of Omelas, she does so because she is concerned that she cannot "convince" us of the city's happiness. The cynicism of the modern world, according to the narrator, has stripped us of the ability to think of joy except in clichés; when we attempt to "describe a happy man," we simply end up talking about "dulcet shepherds, noble savages, [and] bland utopians." It is important to the narrator, however, that Omelas feel real and immediate, so she enlists her readers' own imaginations in an attempt to make the city tangible. This, she suggests, will sidestep an obvious problem—that her definition of happiness may not match the reader's—and may help rid Omelas of some of its "goody-goody" aura; we are free, for instance, to add an "orgy" to the city, provided it does not detract from society's happiness.
Even after all of this, however, the narrator anticipates her readers' skepticism: "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing." That "one thing" is the abandoned child, which the narrator suggests will at last make the people of Omelas "credible" to us. In other words, suffering and exploitation is so pervasive in our own world that we literally cannot imagine an entirely good and happy society.
On the face of it, this would seem to imply that there is no possibility of true happiness (or true justice) existing in our world, since it is difficult to imagine implementing something that we cannot visualize or articulate. This is why the narrator describes those who leave Omelas as walking toward a place that she cannot describe, and which may not even exist; although they have rejected the compromise the city is founded on, it is unclear if there are any other real alternatives. However, the narrator does offer one possible avenue for hope in the very final words of the story: the people who leave "seem to know where they are going." This is obviously not true in any literal sense, since the people of Omelas are presumably just as constrained as we are when it comes to the kind of society they can imagine. Perhaps, however, imagination is not the only basis for action, as the people who leave Omelas seem to be guided by an internal and instinctive sense of right and wrong. Following this sense is obviously risky, since it does not necessarily lead anywhere at all. Nevertheless, the story suggests that when imagination fails, our only moral option may be this kind of blind leap of faith into the unknown.
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By Ursula K. Le Guin
