My Omelas Response Story

2024

Note: This essay contains spoilers regarding the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

As eulogists observed after my mother died, Ursula’s words are there for readers at all life stages. Certainly this has been true for me with “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” though I’m not always happy with what I find in myself as a result. At a young age, I was fairly certain that I would stay in Omelas, and sick about it. Decades later, I’m still unsure I have the stuff to walk away. I envy stronger, more resolute or self-delusional souls who, on learning of the child on whose wretchedness Omelas depends, are certain they’d leave. I reckon, however, that mine is the more common realization—which may be one point of the story.

Judging by discussions, critiques, artist responses and bootleg downloads, Omelas is word-for-word as influential as anything Ursula wrote. She was fond of the story, but slightly mystified by its renown, pointing out that she was hardly the first to explore how we reconcile commonweal and cruelty. Ursula described Omelas as an allegory, but for me it’s more a fable or koan, offering a moral conundrum (arguably the moral conundrum) and a possible resolution, but no prescription or promise that the resolution works. The story is often compared to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a similarly ambiguous semi-allegory, and might be equally canonical in US schools if I gave in to educational publishers who ask me to remove the mention of orgies.

Some reasons this little narrative has staying power are easy to guess. Fables and allegories don’t date quickly (take heed, realists). After a half-century, Omelas remains crisp and fresh.  Educators adore the ratio of words to evergreen moral questions, as well as the story’s quality of mini-bildungsroman: children are at the center of the narrative, in multiple roles, making it highly relatable to students from all walks of life. As icing on the cake, for young people of a certain age, K-pop phenomenon BTS referenced Omelas in their 2017 hit “Spring Day.” But mostly, Omelas is just wicked good. The first sentence may be my favorite in the English language (I’m biased):

 “With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea.”

Ursula’s description of Omelas is evocative and in constant flux. She imagines things one way, then another, then invites us to imagine things our own way. The lyricism and openness lure us. Just as we settle in: wham! If you have read the story, I’ll bet you remember the growing pit in your stomach as you understand that yes, we are going there; we were tricked into confronting that which we prefer to avoid.

Omelas is popular not just with readers but with artists, though whether as a touchstone or millstone, it’s hard to say. I’ve lost count of the novelists, screenwriters and musicians who riff on Ursula’s precedent, as she riffed on those before her. I sympathize with artists who feel a need to show us they’d walk away, or what they’re walking to, or how they’d wreak destruction on the city. These are natural reactions, but they displace and excuse the reader from the story’s conundrum, and risk self-righteousness to boot. I’m less sympathetic to writers who find Omelas too open-ended or poetical for our hard world, recasting it through a saturated filter, louder, angrier or with ironic humor. These remixes add nothing to the questions posed by Omelas. 

Most interesting to me are artists who imagine staying but opposing the bargain on which Omelas exists. This respects the story’s allegorical and open-ended nature, rather than trying to fix or co-opt it. But we should not assume that Ursula didn’t herself think about including a stay-and-oppose option in Omelas. She dedicated much of her life to non-violent protest, and many of her other writings (The Dispossessed as one example) attempt to articulate such choices through detailed political and social world-building. I believe she excluded “stay and fight” because more choices simplify, rather than complicate, readers’ moral dilemma…and that was not her intent with Omelas. In any case, for me, the story doesn’t require reinterpretation by other artists. The earnest grappling of generations of students first encountering Omelas are the best responses I can imagine.