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On the technical side of things, there are a few lessons I have learned from this story. While it isn’t the most riveting piece I’ve read so far, it is certainly one of the most impactful. What I do know, though, is that these questions need to be asked, and for that, I cannot praise The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas enough. I don’t have the answers to these questions. Is it any better to cast that happiness aside, when either way, the suffering will continue? Is it wrong to enjoy what happiness comes out of this suffering? Is it fair to assume that this suffering is inevitable and ultimately out of my hands? Have I learned to turn a blind eye to the suffering all around me, as the people of Omelas do? Or is there some unnamed person paying dearly for it?
#THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS TEXT FREE#
Is my happiness as free of cost as I assume? Le Guin never explicitly takes a stance on the matter.Īs for myself, well… I find that this story has forced me to reexamine my own views on happiness and that this reflection has been fruitless in producing any answers to my questions. They can’t continue living in Omelas while this child exists, and they silently disappear, never to return.Īre these few in the right? Is it immoral for the people of Omelas to tolerate the utter misery that this child must endure? But every once in a while, someone decides to leave. So, most people in Omelas learn this terrible truth and learn to live with it until it passes from their minds entirely. Everything that makes Omelas unique, from its prosperity to its freedom from guilt, would vanish the instant this child experienced joy. In this reality, they could only go on being happy for as long as this child is miserable. They do this because they all understand the condition to their continual happiness. They sometimes even visit, and when they do, they are generally as cruel as its life is horrific. They know where it is and how terrible its conditions are. The people of Omelas know that this child exists. In this room lives a child, and this child is malnourished of food, love, and anything resembling human decency. How did they achieve this? Well, there’s a room, Le Guin explains, in which things are quite different. They are exactly as we are, except that they have attained a level of contentment beyond our dreams. They are no less intelligent or passionate or productive than we are. And most of all, no guilt.ĭespite all this, Le Guin insists that these are not a simple people. These are a people with no laws, no wars, no greed. So happy, in fact, that we could barely conceptualize them.
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There’s one thing she does establish though: the people of Omelas are happy. An embarrassing number of pages later, it dawned on me that this seemingly lackadaisical approach was her way of driving home the point that this is a story about ideas and questions, not plot points and details. I admit, it took me a while to understand what she was getting at, and I was tempted to find something else to read.
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For certain aspects of Omelas, she even invites the reader to decide for themselves how they wish to imagine the place. The first half of the story reads like a sort of rough draft, where she’s etching out the details as she goes. She writes of Omelas as if she had no part in its conception. At first glance, her self-professed ambiguity seems downright lazy. Le Guin reveals very little by way of the particulars – in fact, she’s rather blatant about how little she herself knows of the city. Omelas is a city in an unnamed land during an unspecified time. This is the question that lies at the heart of Ursula Le Guin’s philosophical allegory, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. If you could only be happy at the expense of others, would you? You can read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas here.