The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Essay

Within Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, the narrator struggles to create a world which is both believable to the reader and utopian, until she eventually gives up and brings evil into her storyworld as a last-ditch attempt to make her reader believe in the world she has created. This is a representation of the way in which balance and layering is crucial to a storyworld, not only between the good and the evil, but also throughout other elements such as the old and the new, or the virtuous and that which lacks of virtue. Without these contradictory elements, Omelas would not be able to function as a balanced storyworld, and, arguably, no storyworld would. Omelas is shown within the text as a world which combines traditions of the past and technology of the future. Le Guin’s short story opens by discussing the Festival of Summer, which seems to be quite medieval in its description, from the “old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey”, to the citizens who “exercised their restive horses before the race” (Le Guin, 967). This seems like many a festival which might be described in the typical fantasy novel, and yet the narrator is quick …show more content…
Le Guin, on the other hand, seems to suggest that this is not the treason, but rather the duty of the artist; that the real treason of the artist is a refusal to admit the banality of both good and evil without the other, or the terrible boredom of pain without pleasure to contrast it. Through the way in which the narrator builds Omelas, Le Guin shows the reader that it is impossible for a society not to contradict itself, whether it be between the old and the new, the virtuous and that which is not, the good and the bad, or even between those who stay within in it and ultimately those who walk away from