The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Literary Analysis

In 1975, Ursula K Le Guin wrote “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, a story that describes the town of Omelas and its citizens. On the surface, the town looks to be a magical haven, a seemingly perfect utopia. By rejecting the idea that pain is mandatory, all the citizens are happy, laws (however few there are) have no need to be enforced, and everyone lives in a life without government, excessive work force, or war. The story begins with citizens gathering for the giant Festival of Summer to celebrate the summer solstice. Everything seems to be happy and cheerful. However, the reader is lead down to a musty, dark basement where it is revealed that the city is keeping a young child prisoner in order to, as they think, keep the peace. The

This child hasn’t been living in this closet their entire life. They know how to speak, so they obviously had some sort of positive human contact up until about the age of three or four. They remember “sunlight and [their] mother’s voice”. The child tries to call out occasionally even though they know at this point, after years in the dark and quiet, that they are getting no help. Their pleas of “I will be good!” carry the connotation that they, for some reason, believe that the abuse is deserved; that the child did something wrong in the first place to be given the beatings and poor food. The child is only “nearly ten”. That means that in the recent past, it was decided that the child would be the one to constantly atone for the town in order for it to carry on in its jovial manner. Even if the child was moved to the closet when it was three years old, that means many of the adults remember a time in which there was no child living in the basement closet, being abused daily for their personal comfort and luxury of

These people are the ones who drop everything and just go. One could say that they realize the error of their ways. They finally acknowledge that keeping a child locked up in order to make themselves happy is wrong. These people who leave, whether they be the adolescents who leave directly after seeing the child or adults who wait longer, they are more morally positive than the people who stay because they choose not to live in a town where their lifestyle is benefitted by the torment of a child. However on the flip side, the people who leave don’t actually make a difference in the life of the child. It’s not as if the town keeps inventory of all the people who leave and say to themselves, ‘Well, twenty people left. Let’s hit the child twenty times less’. The only way the people who leave could truly atone for the torture they put upon the child by living in the town would be to set the child