37 pages • 1 hour read
Ursula K. Le GuinThe Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Omelas
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a heavily allegorical story, and even the city itself has symbolic meaning. Although we can take Omelas at face value and still understand Le Guin's critique of utilitarianism, interpreting the narrative too literally may obscure its real-world implications. Clearly, Omelas, as Le Guin describes it, could not exist in reality; for one thing, as the narrator's requests for her readers' input indicate, everyone defines happiness in slightly different terms. As a result, it's difficult to imagine any society that could guarantee happiness to all its citizens. Symbolically, however, Omelas does correspond to most if not all human societies; there are very few social structures that do not sacrifice (or at least ignore) the needs of one group of people to ensure the well-being of another. Omelas, then, represents exploitation in all its forms: depending on the story's reader, the "child" might represent a colonized people, a homeless population, the working class, or other demographics.
Even more abstractly, we can read Omelas as a symbol for the psychological transformation each member of an unjust society goes through in order to survive on a day-to-day basis. The narrator is emphatic about how distressing it is for Omelas’s citizens to learn about the existence of the child, but she also makes clear that most of these people eventually stay (and thrive) in the city. To do so, however, they rationalize the child's suffering in various ways, arguingthat it would not be able to experience happiness even if it were released: presumably, the knowledge of the child's existence would be too painful to live with if the people of Omelas did not find ways to explain some of its misery away. Looked at from this perspective, Omelas symbolizes the state of willed happiness that many of us cultivate, rather than facing up to the reality of injustice.
Nakedness
Although the narrator leaves many details of Omelas to the reader's imagination, one thing she does comment on specifically is the nakedness of the boys and girls out on the Green Fields. Given what we know about Omelas—that it is a place of virtually total happiness—this description may at first call to mind the "innocent" nakedness of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The narrator, however, is insistent that the people of Omelas—though happy—are not ignorant, and she goes on to explain that in Omelas there may be "beautiful nudes […] wander[ing] about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh." However, while it is clear that nakedness in Omelas can be sexual, it is innocent in the sense that it does not seem to carry with it any embarrassment, shame, or negative implications at all.
The meaning of nakedness shifts, however, in the narrator's description of the abandoned child. Up until this point, nakedness in the story has been not only matter-of-fact but also (presumably) comfortable: the people of Omelas do not seem to need clothing as shelter or protection from bad weather or insects, for example. The child's nakedness, however, is a sign of extreme neglect, revealing the physical effects of its treatment (e.g. open sores) while also underscoring the totality of its deprivation. Le Guin, in other words, uses nudity as a motif to explore the extremes of happiness and suffering, as well as the relationship between the two states.
Music
One of the primary ways the narrator works to convince us of the beauty and happiness of Omelas is through the motif of music: gongs and tambourines accompany the parade, an old man plays on a flute, bells chime, and trumpets sound. In part, this is simply a way for Le Guin to evoke the sensory and aesthetic pleasures of life in Omelas. It is striking, however, that Le Guin chooses to focus on music rather than (for example) literature or painting. Since music does not necessarily have words, and since (unlike a lot of visual art) it does not directly represent any particular, concrete place, event, or person, it is a good vehicle for experiences that exceed our ability to describe them. This is important, because the narrator depicts Omelas as a place of literally unimaginable happiness: given the imperfection of our own world, we can't quite understand what it would mean to live there. Le Guin therefore uses music as a way of hinting at a kind of joy that greatly surpasses what we can imagine or give voice to.
Related Titles
By Ursula K. Le Guin
