The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is the story of the title city and its inhabitants. Omelas is a utopia, bright and perpetually peaceful, plentiful, and happy. Its bounty is sustained, though, by the relegation of a single hapless and faultless child in grueling poverty and squalor. All citizens are told of this fact when they come of age, and the majority are able to reconcile their lives to it. Some, though, abandon the city and walk out into the unknown.
Le Guin states that the city's name is pronounced "OH-meh-lahss" . Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. "[… People ask me] 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?"
"The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov , and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition."
The quote from William James is:
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical 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?
Introducing the short story in her 2012 collection The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two , Le Guin noted that The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality."
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