© William Cody Deaton 2008 AN EXAMINATION OF THE THEME OF URSULA K. LE GUIN’S “THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS” by William Deaton Anything that is worth something is, by definition, not free, and the cost at which one is willing to obtain a thing is the gauge of that thing’s importance to that one. There is no escaping this; even happiness―real happiness―comes at a price―suffering―and the only choice one has in the matter is whether one will let another pay that price, or take the responsibility oneself―as Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” illustrates. Consider, to begin with, those who tenant the city of happiness and its surrounding suburbs. They are, by the narrator’s own testimony, happy: this is explicitly stated in the first sentence of paragraph three, on page 733. Moreover, the reader is assured of the sincerity of said happiness, that the state of those living in Omelas is not one to brook protest or pity: further along in the same paragraph, on the same page, the narrator notes that the citizens of Omelas “were not naïve and happy children . . . . They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched”; and again, in paragraph twelve, on page 736, it is asserted that this happiness was “no vapid, irresponsible happiness.” In short, don’t worry about the people of Omelas; they are not sheltered innocents, nor are they brainwashed lotuseaters; they are “not less complex than us” (733). Here the reader would do well to note the narrator’s definition of happiness as being “based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive” (73334). As the reader will observe that the people of Omelas did without such things as slavery, cars and the bomb, yet were allowed such niceties as trams and washing machines, he may infer from all this that the narrator’s assertion is that happiness involves accepting what must be, embracing what may be, and refusing what ought not be. But at what cost? If the happy citizens of Omelas have indeed achieved a real happiness, and the highest grade of such, with what have they paid for this treasure? Or put another way: what have they sacrificed for it? The answer, it appears, is happiness. At paragraph eight, the narrator begins to describe a less obvious element in the existence of the city of happiness: not everyone there is happy. In particular, there is a child, “nearly ten” (735), of indeterminate sex, imprisoned and abused in a tool room hidden away “in a casement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes . . .” The state of this child is outrageous: it sits in the darkness of the room, a darkness relieved only rarely and briefly by what might be euphemistically referred to as its feeding time; it is naked, malnourished to the point of emaciation; its legs are covered with sores, probably infected, due to its being compelled by imbecilic fear to huddle in one of the room’s dark, damp corners, sitting in its own bodily wastes. And what is more, the child is made a spectacle of at each “feeding time” ―its diet being “a halfbowl of corn meal and grease a day”―its attendant being always followed by a group of those happy people, now succumbing instead to a sense of horror and disgust. To make matters still worse, the child, who has had enough human exposure to know of the existence of better lots than its own, will occasionally plead with its attendant and spectators: “‘I will be good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’” But no one heeds, and for this reason: “. . . they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly upon this child’s abominable misery.” Which is all just a long way of reiterating what was asserted at the outset of this paper: that happiness is bought only with suffering. But those of Omelas are not hypocrites; they adhere to the narrator’s idea of happiness, and part of that happiness is acceptance of what must be. The reader is made to know with certainty that the fire of one child’s hell is the one thing that keeps the heaven of Omelas going; such a thing must be. And so, though the ones who bear witness to the horrible lot of the child in the tool room often “go home in tears, or in a tearless rage”, they eventually come to accept the “terrible justice
of reality”―and what is more, it is this very angst, and their subsequent acceptance of it, which allows them to achieve the true happiness which is the hallmark of Omelas and its people, as is made explicit in paragraph twelve. The reader is made to understand that, in spite of the outrageousness of the situation in Omelas, neither it nor its people are at fault; if the torment of one for many is an injustice, how much more could the helping of one at the cost of hurting so many be an injustice? Such is the way of things in Omelas. Yet, in the final paragraph, the reader discovers one more facet of this horrible beauty: that there is more dissatisfaction in Omelas that that of a mere child in a cellar. There are those who, upon discovering the hideous axis upon which beautiful Omelas turns, no longer desire the happiness it offers; they resolve to leave it, to exchange it for another place, a place the evidence for whose existence, so far as can be determined from any reading of the story, exists only in the hopes of those who leave Omelas to seek it; there is no indication that anyone has ever, or will ever find it. The interesting thing is, neither are these emigrants hypocrites; it is just that they have different ideas about what must be and what ought not be. Looked at from this perspective, the emigrants could be said to be at least as happy as those who return home from the tool room weeping, later to dry their eyes and leap with relish into their happiness that the child might not suffer in vain; but instead of living under the patronage of the child, they opt to buy their happiness with their own suffering, by leaving the city of happiness for a world which is certain to be less happy. The happiness―real happiness―may be legitimately achieved either way but not through any other; this is a significant point of “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”―and one which, to be sure, it illustrates quite effectively. Works Cited Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The Bedford Introduction to English Literature, 8th Ed. Bedford; Boston. 2008
