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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas | Introduction

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is Ursula K. Le Guin's allegorical tale about a Utopian society in which Omelas' happiness is made possible by the sacrifice of one child for the sake of the group. In an allegory, many symbols and images are used in an attempt to illustrate universal truths about life. ''Omelas'' was first published in the magazine New Directions in 1973, and the following year it won Le Guin the prestigious Hugo Award for best short story. It was subsequently printed in her short story collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975. Le Guin is known primarily as a science fiction and fantasy writer, and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is notable for being one of the few short stories of the genre to be widely anthologized in collections of general fiction. It is also notable for containing a vagueness uncharacteristic of many short story writers; its narrator leaves it up to the reader to imagine many of the town's details and characters.

The story is subtitled "Variations on a Theme by William James." William James was the older brother of the novelist Henry James. Le Guin was intrigued by James's theory of pragmatism, which states that a person's thoughts should guide his or her actions, and that truth is the consequences of a person's belief. Taking this theory to its moral conclusion, she fashioned the land of Omelas.

Readers looking for clues as to where the city of Omelas is located should note that Le Guin devised the town's name by reading a roadside sign backwards. Thus, "Omelas" is an anagram of Salem, Oregon, a fact that the author has stated is not particularly relevant. Some critics have noted the similarity of the story's ideas with the themes of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who wrote Crime and Punishment, another work concerned with morality. But Le Guin has stated that only in retrospect did the similarities between his work and hers occur to her; it was not a major influence in the writing of the story.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Summary

"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas'' opens as the celebration of the Festival of Summer is getting underway in the city of Omelas. There is an air of genuine excitement about the festival, with its flag-adorned boats, noisy running children, prancing horses, and "great joyous clanging of the bells."

The narrator, who never identifies him or herself, steps back from describing the scene to comment that, "Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions.... Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time."

However, the narrator hastens to add, the people of Omelas ''were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect they were singularly few." The people of Omelas are happy, and the narrator explains his or her belief that "we" (presumably enlightened, contemporary westerners) have a ''bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid."

As the narrator continues to describe the people and the city, he or she stops using the past tense verbs of a traditional narration and switches to the conditional: "I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets." The people's happiness is not determined by the external accoutrements of life in Omelas, but rather, whatever is in Omelas "follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people." This happiness is "based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive." They "could perfectly well" have some of the luxuries belonging to the middle category, but, as the narrator tells the reader, other than the fact that they are happy, what they have or do not have "doesn't matter. As you like it." The narrator has an idea about what life is like... » Complete The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Summary