The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas -Ursula K. Le Guin

I love a dystopian setting. The more bleak the better. So when I saw a review of the book on Bookstagram, I knew I would be reading it soon. The opportunity presented itself this week while was taking a sick day. I figured that a short story would be perfect for the day but I had miscalculated the depth of the story.

The Blurb

“A narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child. Some inhabitants of the peaceful kingdom cannot tolerate the act of cruelty that underlies its happiness.“

The Book

With a blurb as short as this I was intrigued to see what the author has packed into the story. As I tried researching the book, I learnt an interesting fact about the name ‘Omelas’. The author saw the letters of the city of ‘Salem, Oregon’ on her rear view mirror and came up with the name of her fictional town. This goes to show that inspiration can strike anywhere to a person who is ready to accept it with an open mind!

The book begins with a narrator describing the town of Omelas and its people. The narrator is very vague and lets the reader make their own assumptions about the people and their governance, only hinting that it was a place without an overt consciousness of rules. The only thing that is described in earnest is the happiness of the town’s children who remain innocent until they are in their early teens.

I did not think that I would like the vagueness of the story but to my surprise I found that that was the most interesting part of the book. The narrator lets you set things up in your mind and then begins to shatter all your utopian fantasies. I quickly discovered that the book was definitely not one to be read while sick and in bed.

Although the narrator only uses a few paragraphs to describes the child, the descriptions stay with you for a long time. You cannot get over the unfairness of it all. You cannot help but wonder what the child had done to be picked as the one to live in misery. You cannot help but put yourself in it’s place and be thankful that it is just a story. I remember reading, in explicit detail, the misery of living in a tiny space day after day in a memoir of an escaped slave in revolutionary America. She had the awareness that she was enduring the misery to avoid being caught by her persecutors but the little child in the story does not know what is happening to it and why. I was glad that the narrator did not find any townspeople who came to look at the plight of the child just for their pleasure. It gave me hope in humanity that everyone who watched the child was described as going back in horror or disgust and some of the people had the moral strength to turn their backs on the illusion of happiness and peace in the town and go into the unknown.

I would have loved for the author to have written an explanation about what happens to the people who leave town. Are they hunted like the people in Divergent were or are they removed from the town records? What happens to the child when it grows up? Who takes its place when the Lord finally grants it peace? How is the next child selected? But the beauty of the author’s writing is in the fact that she lets the readers make their decisions and lets them pick an ending that will let them sleep at night.

The Author

Ursula K. Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, yielding more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a “major voice in American Letters”.

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Having earned a master’s degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies, but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s, and achieved major critical and commercial success.

Le Guin was strongly influenced by cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several works. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books. She explored alternative political structures in many stories.