The ones who walk away from Omelas..

[Raven_Rayes]

In the fictional city of Omelas, the inhabitants seem to live happy and fulfilling lives. The story opens with the Festival of Summer, an annual festival celebrating the arrival of the season. The citizens of Omelas celebrate with a procession involving the whole city. Boys and girls ride horses. There is music, and singing, and the clanging of bells.

The narrator tells us that the people of Omelas are not simple folk, but they are happy. They have no King, and do not keep slaves. They are not barbarians. Although the narrator confesses to lacking detailed knowledge of the laws and rules of Omelas, they suspect there are relatively few. Consumerist culture is unknown to the people of the city: they have no stock exchange and no advertisements around the city. They have no need of a secret police. It sounds like a utopia. The narrator confides that Omelas sounds like a city out of some fairy tale.

[Raven_Rayes]

After describing the city of Omelas and its inhabitants in more detail, and then returning to the procession for the Festival of Summer, the narrator mentions one final detail: in a basement under one of the ‘beautiful public buildings’ of the city, or perhaps in a cellar somewhere in a private house, there is a child of nearly ten years old, though they (the child is of indeterminate gender) look around six years old, so malnourished and stunted are they.

This child is kept imprisoned in this one windowless room, living literally in their own filth. Sometimes the child is brought just enough food to keep it alive, but the child is never allowed out of its prison cell. The child has not always lived in this room, but once knew their mother’s voice. Every now and then the child promises, to nobody, that they will be good if only someone will let them out of the room. But nobody ever does.

[Raven_Rayes]

And this, the narrator tells us, is the dirty, dark, unpleasant secret that ensures the happiness of the rest of the city of Omelas: the rest of the city can only function if this one child is kept in ‘abominable misery’ all the time.

[Raven_Rayes]

When children become old enough to understand, they are told about the child in the room. Often they are brought to see the miserable child on whom their own happiness, and that of their fellow citizens, is dependent. They are always shocked and sickened by the sight of the maltreated child, and feel angry, outraged, but ultimately powerless to help the child. They know that if the child was freed from their captivity, it would be the morally right thing to do, but on the other hand, the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would vanish.

[Raven_Rayes]

But there are some, the narrator tells us at the end of the story, who are so appalled by a society that would be set up in such a way, that they just walk out of the city and leave, heading for somewhere else. The narrator doesn’t know where they are headed, but they seem to know where they are going,

‘the ones who walk away from Omelas’.