The answer to that question is in the story: Because all the wellbeing of everyone else depends on the suffering of the child. The moment the child is rescued, everybody else will begin to suffer as hopelessly as the child does now. That’s how things are in the story. It’s the rule of this game. You can only play a game -- chess, soccer, parable -- if you follow the rules. Games and stories are imitations of life, ways of playing at life, sometimes ways of learning how to live. Some of the rules may appear both cruel and arbitrary. But if you want to play the game, or live the life, you have to follow them.
Most of the questions I get about “Omelas,” however, I can’t answer. They’re based on the assumption that the story itself is the answer to a question, and want me to explain it to them. But it isn’t an answer. It’s a question.
I didn’t think the question up. I invented this particular way of asking it, yes. But I’d found it asked by two writers I read earlier in my life. It sank deep into my mind, and came out again at last in the form of a story.
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother the story of a little girl, horribly abused by her own mother, locked in a filthy outhouse, weeping, beating her heart with “her tiny fist in the dark and the cold.” And Ivan says:
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature – that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that the men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it, would remain happy?”
“No,” said Alyosha.
I first read The Brothers Karamazov when I was seventeen or eighteen. Ten or fifteen years later, reading the American philosopher William James’ talk, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” I came on this passage:
If the hypothesis were offered us that millions [should be] kept happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical 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.
Dostoyevsky’s novel was first published in 1880; James gave his talk in 1891. The novel wasn’t translated into English till 1912. It’s possible that James read it in German or French, or read some reference to this passage, but it seems likelier that he and Dostoyevsky were pondering the same timeless moral problems each in his own way. Both men were Christians. Both posit a plan for making all mankind happy on the “one simple condition” of the absolute misery of an unimportant person. Dostoyevsky frames the question in essentially religious terms, James philosophically.
Dostoyevsky’s Ivan asks Alyosha – and us -- “Would you consent to carry out the plan, would you accept the happiness, on that condition?” And Alyosha answers, “No.” James thinks that a specific moral emotion or response would immediately, inevitably lead us all to that same answer.
The intensity of the question is sharper in Dostoyevsky, but the answer is just as clear in James’ quiet language.
My story presents the same “plan” on the same condition, and involves the reader even more directly in considering the question, but asks the question without offering any answer to it. All we see is that, even when so much is to be gained for so many at such a comparatively tiny cost, some of the people of Omelas – but only some – refuse the bargain and turn their backs on the city of happiness.
In talking about the “meaning” of a story, we need to be careful not to diminish it, impoverish it. A story can say different things to different people. It may have no definitive reading.
And a reader may find a meaning in it that the writer never intended, never imagined, yet recognizes at once as valid.
I got just such a shock of revelation and recognition from a letter sent me a couple of years ago by a young reader, who wrote:
The city of happiness, well, we all live there and people go about their business with full knowledge of the child in the closet.
And then at times I refuse to believe we are in the city of happiness and that instead we are all ones who walked away. Until I read in the news that a man was waterboarded 103 times in one month. Then I think we are all in the closet. Too stupid to understand what life we could have outside the walls around us.
This isn’t “the correct interpretation.” It’s simply one way to read the story – a painful, profoundly responsible way. In this view, we’re not the utopian planners of Dostoyevsky’s tale, nor are we the free, judging minds of James’ proposition. Omelas already exists: no need to build it or choose it. We already live here – in the narrow, foul, dark prison we let our ignorance, fear, and hatred build for us and keep us in, here in the splendid, beautiful city of life. . . .
-- UKL, 2016
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
URSULA K. LE GUIN was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, and lives in Portland, Oregon. She has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, PEN-Malamud, and National Book Awards, as well as the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
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PRAISE FOR URSULA K. LE GUIN AND THE WIND’S TWELVE QUARTERS
“There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula Le Guin’s.”
—Grace Paley
“[Le Guin] wields her pen with a moral psychological sophistication rarely seen . . . she writes fables: splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative tales.”
—Newsweek
“Ursula K. Le Guin fashions ideas like a goldsmith: intricate, involved, and confident. Her prose sparkles like sunlight on water.”
—Chicago News
“An elegant writer, deft with the poetry of language.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Ursula Le Guin’s prose breathes light and intelligence. She can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“[Le Guin’s] work transcends the usual limitations of the genre.”
—The New Yorker
“An important writer, period.”
—Washington Post
“She is a splendid short-story writer. . . . Fiction, like Borges’s, that finds its life in the interstices between the borders of speculative fiction and realism.”
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“For sheer depth of imagination Ursula K. Le Guin has few rivals in American literature today. . . . Like Borges, she is an original, a consummately unique storyteller.”
—Judith Freeman
“Le Guin’s powerful work illustrates that fantasy need not be escapist, that gender studies need not be dry or strident, and that entertainment need not be mindless.”
—The Onion
“In recent years, no [writer] inside the field of science fiction or outside of it [has] done more to create a modern conscience.”
—New Republic
“Le Guin is as good as any contemporary at creating worlds, imaginary or our own.”
—Time
“I don’t know anyone else who can do what Le Guin does. Her work is simple and brilliantly clear, like a Buddha’s laugh: joyfully serious, delighted with the joke that is life. Le Guin writes about love, pure
and simple—love and all the ways in which it refuses to be bound—and she does so beautifully.”
—Nicola Griffith
“Ms. Le Guin has to be accounted a science fiction writer because most of her short stories rocket about outer space, but her knack of translating recognizable states of mind into fantastic action brings her close to the old fairy tale field. She is the ideal science fiction writer for readers who ordinarily dislike science fiction.”
—Atlantic
“One of our finest projectionists of brave old and other worlds.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Ursula K. Le Guin] examines the most public of politics and the most intimate of emotions, constantly challenging her readers to reconsider what it means to be human and humane.”
—Mary Doria Russell
“[E]verything Le Guin does is interesting, believable, and exquisitely detailed.”
—Los Angeles Herald Examiner
“Ursula Le Guin is more than a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher, an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.”
—Cincinnati Enquirer
“For a number of years the only science fiction I read was that of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t read science fiction anymore, though I wouldn’t think of missing a book of Le Guin’s. She has transcended the genre to become what it was clear she would become: our wise-woman, our seeress, a writer of infinite range and power. . . . This woman can do anything! Long may she continue to do it all.”
—Carolyn Kitzer
ALSO BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
NOVELS
Always Coming Home
The Beginning Place
City of Illusion
The Dispossessed
The Eye of the Heron
The Farthest Shore
The Lathe of Heaven
The Left Hand of Darkness
Malafrena
The Other Wind
Planet of Exile
Rocannon’s World
Tehanu
The Telling
The Tombs of Atuan
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else
A Wizard of Earthsea
The Word for World Is Forest
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Birthday of the World
Buffalo Gals
The Compass Rose
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
Four Ways to Forgiveness
Orsinian Tales
Searoad
Tales from Earthsea
Unlocking the Air
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
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COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in New Dimensions 3, 1973.
Excerpted from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, originally published in hardcover in 1975 by HarperCollins Publishers.
THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS. Copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition February 2017 ISBN 9780062470973
Print ISBN 978-0-06-091434-9
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