The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Critical Analysis

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story written by author Ursula K. Le Guin. The story is set in the fictional utopian city of Omelas in which seemingly everyone is happy and lives a contented life. All of the town’s citizens are aware of a cellar in Omelas where a destitute, abused young boy is imprisoned in squalor. The very existence of Omelas and the happiness of its residents depends solely on the suffering of the young boy. If the boy was saved from his pitiful condition or shown the compassion he deserves, all of Omelas would come apart at that moment. The residents of Omelas know that they must realize the iniquity in their society to be able to appreciate the good they reap from it. Faced by an awareness of the oppression they inflict upon the innocent boy to preserve the happiness of the rest of Omelas, they rationalize the boy’s suffering, blurring the lines between what is truly good and truly evil.

In the opening of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” the citizens of Omelas are depicted as happy-go-lucky people alive in a society free from much of the negative tumult humanity is regularly subjected to yet justifies; dark institutions

coexisting with our lives without our objection. “As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb (Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away” 824).” As is the case in our reality, the people of Omelas discern the abundant happiness they enjoy from the context of their immediate lives as their lives fit into the greater mechanism of the civilization they are a part of. “Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive (Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walked Away” 825).” Before Le Guin reveals the necessary evil Omelas turns a blind eye to, through the apparent comparison between bastions of our reality and the reality of Omelas, Le Guin leads the reader to question how and why we differentiate between what is accepted as destructive and what is accepted as necessary. How do we discriminate what is accepted as truly evil from what is accepted as a necessary evil?
The line between reality and illusion is blurred as much in our world as it is in the world of Omelas. What is accepted as a necessary evil essential to real lives is no less arbitrated by our society than the consent to the abuse of the small child in Omelas. Similar to the reaction toward atrocities present in our world, the people of Omelas treat what’s initially intolerable at first sight with indifference in time. As Le Guin writes about the youngsters in Omelas who go to see the tortured child, “No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight (“The Ones Who Walked Away” 827).”
Le Guin quotes William James from his work “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, “what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain (qtd.

in “The Scapegoat” 1509)?” It is not clearly the idea that good does not exist without evil that Le Guin begs us to question in “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas”, but rather what is in fact good versus what is in fact evil. If one is compelled to repulsion at a necessary evil their lifestyle is dependent upon, when does the indifference they espouse toward the said evil decide what is unquestionably evil and what is

not.
In spite of the omnipresent unresponsiveness toward the presence of such an atrocity in Omelas, some of the people of Omelas chose to leave the city because they can not reconcile with their consciousness of it. “At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all (Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walked Away” 828).” The ones who walk away show that regardless of the societal boundaries that exist between good and evil in Omelas, their necessary evil is indeed destructive. Although the ones who walk away do nothing to liberate the young boy from this destruction, in their hearts they accept the intuitive, candid discernment of necessity and destruction and reject the expectations of the society they’re a part of. Even so, as Le Guin apprises, “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 (“The Ones Who Walked Away” 828).” Without the framework humanities judgement between good and evil creates, life as part of a society at all becomes altogether unfathomable.