Indeed, the narrator is what we might call an ‘uncertain narrator’ (as distinct from an unreliable narrator), because they readily confess to the limits of their knowledge about Omelas and its practices.

Of course, there is no rhyme or reason why the city’s happiness and prosperity should be dependent on the misery of one child. But writers often ‘remember’ things they think they’ve forgotten, these ideas lying buried deep in the mind until the author finds a use for them. Indeed, Le Guin claimed in her note that she had also encountered a version of this moral problem in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, although she had forgotten she’d read it there. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ and morality ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ invites us to reflect on this moral question, although Le Guin, through her tentative narrator (who is something of a semi-informed bystander, rather than someone living ‘in’ the society of Omelas, and thus being complicit), doesn’t press the moral issue on us too hard, instead letting us respond to the troubling scenario ourselves, forming our own questions in response. The philosophy of Utilitarianism, often expressed as ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, is relevant here, too.īut what if the greatest happiness for the majority depended, not merely on a minority being unhappy, but on a minority actively being kept in a perpetual state of misery? What if that were the condition on which everyone else’s happiness and success depended? Would that be morally acceptable, or would it not, rather, strike us as morally repugnant? Here, James is reflecting on the idealised perfect societies of writers of fiction – mostly socialists, such as Edward Bellamy (whose Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was a huge bestseller upon its publication in the US in 1888) and William Morris (who wrote a socialist utopia novel, News from Nowhere, in 1890). 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?

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.

Ursula le guin the ones who walk away