The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

This is a short story, not a novel, ten or so pages depending on the edition, and I want to say up front that I’m reviewing it here alongside full length books because it earns the same shelf space in my head as anything three times its length. I read it in one sitting on a lunch break and thought about almost nothing else for the rest of the day.

Le Guin describes a genuinely beautiful city, festivals, real joy, a population that’s actually happy rather than performing happiness, and the trick of the story is that this happiness only works because it depends on one specific child being kept in permanent, deliberate suffering somewhere out of sight. Every citizen of Omelas knows this. It’s part of growing up there, being shown the child at some point and having to decide what you do with that knowledge. Most people, per the story’s own accounting, decide to keep living their happy lives anyway.

What makes this land as hard as it does is the direct address. Le Guin isn’t just describing Omelas, she’s periodically turning to the reader and asking you to fill in the gaps of what would make this place convincing to you personally, what details would make the happiness real in your imagination, and that technique implicates you in building the very system the story is interrogating before it even asks the actual question. Would you walk away. Could you. Most people who’ve read this can’t answer cleanly, and I think that’s the entire point.

I’ve reread it probably four times now, always in one sitting since it doesn’t really allow for a natural stopping point, and it hits differently depending on what’s going on in my own life when I pick it up. That’s a rare thing for something this short to pull off. Absolutely worth the twenty minutes it takes.