“Omelas” and the Unbearable
This essay discusses topics relating to child abuse, child death, racism and genocide.
In 2018, N. K. Jemisin wrote and published the short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”, a direct response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.
Le Guin’s story is about a utopian city, so beautiful and wonderful that even she, in her role as narrator, acknowledges that she cannot fully describe it to us. It is not a goody-goody heaven; people still drink alcohol and make merry – but it is a place of infinite joy.
But there is a catch. For, you see, the happiness of the city depends upon the misery of a forsaken child, locked in the dark, starved, tormented and tortured.
All the people in Omelas know of the child’s existence. They know that their happiness cannot exist but for the child’s misery. All of them have, implicitly, done grim calculations, and decided that the child’s misery is all the better for the good of the majority.
But there are those who, upon seeing the child, are outraged, disquieted, disturbed. Those people, they make the decision to leave the city, to leave behind its majesty and joy, to go elsewhere.
Le Guin closes her story by telling us that she cannot describe where these people go, “but they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
Jemisin’s story is based around a parody of Omelas called Um-Helat, one which, like Omelas, requires the misery of a child for all its happiness and splendour.
Jemisin’s response to Le Guin’s story, as the title implies, suggests that walking away is not the only option. That the people of Omelas could stay, could fight from within the city walls, could save the child, to create a better world where no child has to suffer, even if it means an end to the happiness of the city.
Jemisin’s story is well-written, but it is founded on a faulty reading.
“The Ones Who Stay and Fight” rests entirely on the premise that to walk away from Omelas is a cowardly move, that the city of Omelas is a literal place, that the very act of walking away from Omelas is almost worse than staying and basking in its joys. This reading of the story is perhaps understandable, but it is, nevertheless, a poor reading.
Ursula K. Le Guin did not only write “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. She wrote many other stories, though this particular story is the one with which many people will be most familiar. It is one of those stories that sticks in the mind of the general reader more than any other, a story like Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”, or Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”.
Le Guin was also the mind behind the acclaimed Earthsea series, as well as her science fiction, including the Hainish Cycle – a series of loosely-connected stories based around a galactic human civilisation, with Earth being among many planets seeded by the planet Hain some millions of years ago.
Le Guin uses the Hainish Cycle to explore political and philosophical themes. The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world where every human being is neither male nor female – they are male for parts of their lives, and female for others (it includes the memorable line “The king was pregnant”). The Word for World Is Forest is set on a forest world populated by small, green-furred humanoids, who are violently oppressed by an invading force of humans from our own planet, Earth, seeking wood after they used up all the trees on their homeworld. It was written, by Le Guin’s own admission, out of her feelings of anger and powerlessness at the Vietnam War.
Among the very finest novels Le Guin ever wrote was The Dispossessed, which is set alternately on the desert moon-world Anarres, whose inhabitants live in an anarcho-communist society, and on the planet Urras, which more resembles Earth in the twentieth century in terms of global politics (with a capitalist bloc and a state socialist bloc), and around which Anarres orbits.
Urras, like Omelas, appears on the surface to be a utopia, but in its counterpart for the Western world, A-Io, the ruling, “propertied class” (to borrow an Anarresti expression) is shown to owe a lot of its wealth and privilege to the starvation of many thousands of children, whose emaciated corpses are shown to the children of Anarres at school, as a reminder: This is what capitalism gets you.
On the other hand, we later learn that the people of Earth — us — who fled their planet after an ecological disaster regard Urras as a paradise, compared to the deforested, dead planet they left behind. Yet, so much of the prosperity enjoyed in A-Io, so admired by the Terran natives, cannot be without the misery and death of children.
In the context of this story, we often hear reference to “Odonian” ideals, Odo being the founding mother of Anarres, Karl Marx and Emma Goldman and Vladimir Lenin all in one. We learn a little more about Odo in Le Guin’s short story, “The Day Before The Revolution”, in which we see her as an elderly woman after suffering a debilitating stroke.
Odo, Le Guin said, was one of the ones who walk away from Omelas. A woman with more than empty sympathy for the downtrodden, but an understanding that, to change the world, one must sacrifice, put their money where their mouth is, and do something about it.
That is what it is to walk away from Omelas. To recognise that a system that is at its core founded on cruelty, that cannot survive without it, is without hope of reform. One cannot “stay and fight”, for Omelas is not a place. It is a system. It is a set of ideas. It is our world, our Western world, our democratic institutions, the so-called “developed world” which depends upon the suffering of millions.
To walk away from Omelas is not cowardice, not dereliction of duty, not abandonment of a person in need. It is to understand that there can be no changing an oppressive system from within. There is no voting away a system that, by necessity, requires famine, and war, and poverty to grant a privileged few some pale “freedom”.
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I have been thinking a lot lately on the ways in which we respond to the unbearable in fiction.
There is a common impulse, when a work of fiction upsets us or disquiets us, to put it right. A lot of fan fiction communities thrive on writing what are called “fix fics” — stories written to “fix” stories that, in the original canon, did not play out the way the fan fiction writer wanted. For example, in the community devoted to Bridge to Terabithia fan fiction, there is a term used for stories in which Leslie, the main character’s best friend, who infamously dies in an accident towards the end of the book, does not die: LDD.
There is a need, a drive, an impulse to set right what has been made wrong. Humans are, by and large, empathetic creatures. We hate to see human, or anthropomorphic characters suffer, be parted from lovers forever, be tortured, lose limbs, or, of course, die. It is only natural that some are sufficiently bothered by the unbearable in fiction that they feel a need to fix it.
I, myself, have done this in my own fiction, in oblique ways: Trying to set right wrongs I have seen elsewhere, to tell stories the way I would tell them, to punish villainous carbon-copies in the way I feel the originals ought to have been punished.
Yet, this is always a selfish desire. It speaks to a distrust between the reader and the writer, a feeling that the writer causes the reader pain out of genuine malice, rather than stimulate those emotions for the sake of drama and entertainment, or, more importantly, to provoke the reader into seeing things in a new light, reconsidering their actions, questioning their values and where their allegiances lie.
I cannot speak to Jemisin’s specific motivations in writing “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”, but the effect is the same regardless: It reads as though Jemisin is charging Le Guin with cowardice, as though Le Guin herself abandoned the poor child in Omelas, left the child in the hands of tormentors, as if Le Guin, by extension, was apathetic to the misery of people around the world, even though, as we have established, she emphatically was not.
Earlier, I mentioned the story “The Cold Equations”, by Tom Godwin, considered by some scholars to be one of the first truly “hard” science fiction stories. It displays this hardness in brutal fashion: A young girl stows away on a spaceship carrying medical supplies to a planet in desperate need. It turns out the ship has strict weight and fuel requirements that assume a certain amount of cargo – and crew – aboard. If the girl is not thrown out of the airlock, the ship will crash, killing the whole crew, and the people who need the supplies will die.
In the end, there is no salvation, no great flash of inspiration that wins the day. The girl steps out of the airlock and dies in the cold darkness of space.
That story, too, was met with outrage with readers, who in 1954 had never been confronted with such a bleak conclusion. This was the waning years of the Golden Age of SF, a time of ray-guns, bug-eyed monsters, idealistic strong-jawed heroes and damsels in distress.
An innocent young girl who could not be saved by the powers of capital-S Science? By Man, who split the atom, who was making his first ventures into space, who might someday soon walk on the Moon? In 1954, that was unconscionable.
Just as an aside: The story’s ending was shaped by John W. Campbell, a controversial figure in SF, among whose many indefensible views was a prevailing attitude of misogyny. You can certainly read this attitude into the way he demanded that Godwin kill the girl at the end, as though to teach her some lesson, as though to warn women “You see what happens when you don’t listen to men?”
But the story was effective. Many writers since then have tried to answer the story, find a way of saving the girl, making it so everyone gets their happy ending. Even Godwin himself attempted this, but each attempt was shot down by John Campbell, who demanded that the story end with the girl’s demise.
The notion of the unbearable in fiction is that which drives people to extremes, to try to correct a perceived imbalance. The girl can’t be saved in this version of events, but in mine, I have an ingenious solution. The child cannot be spared the abuse in this telling of the tale, but in mine, my brave revolutionaries gear up and ready themselves to swoop in, to save the child from its plight.
In his video essay “The Men Who Couldn’t Stop Crying, and Other Unbearable Realities”, Jacob Geller explores the capacity of art to provoke, by exposing the viewer and interpreter to a phenomenon called, in Ancient Greek, enargeia.
This word, Geller says, was translated by Alice Oswald, who created a translation of the Iliad in 2011, as “bright, unbearable reality”. It is a quality of all truly sublime narrative art, the ability to provoke vivid emotional and physical responses out of pure aesthetics, to the point of extreme emotional reactions.
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is one such story that invokes enargeia. The quality of its prose not only convinces us of the splendour of Omelas, but also of the abjection in which the miserable child is forced to live to uphold that splendour. At its core, it drills down into an intense, emotional truth.
Perhaps this is why so many remain convinced that there is a way to save the child, that walking away is to abandon the child to suffering, but that staying is not, in its own way, continuing to prolong the child’s suffering, even if you are vocally critical, even if you take up arms and revolt against the situation. Because, remember, Omelas is not a place. It does not literally exist. It is an allegory for a painful reality many of us would rather not think about.
On that note, there is another truth, concealed within the story, which perhaps adds another layer of meaning and emotional complexity to the tale.
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In “The Word For Man Is Ishi”, a 2023 episode of the podcast The Last Archive, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey and Jill Lepore discuss the impact of one particular sequence of historical events on Le Guin’s writing, and in particular, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. You should listen to the podcast episode, but I will summarise the key points here.
A man was found wandering alone by a slaughterhouse in California in 1911. He was aged about fifty years old. When people tried to speak to him, first in English and then in Spanish, they found that he could not answer them. He did not even seem to understand the words coming out of their mouths as speech. It was only when anthropologists studying Indigenous American languages came to him with a phrasebook and spoke words to him in the Yana language that his face lit up in recognition.
The Yana people were reclusive hunter-gatherers. In the 1860s, the white settlers of California carried out a genocide of the Yana people – though that term did not exist at the time – and the Yahi people were a subgroup of this people.
The remainder, which included the man and his family, retreated into hiding for decades. At some point, the man’s family died, and the man was left alone. Some time after, he was found wandering, and taken in.
The man, being effectively stateless, was handed over to the University of California, Berkeley, on a campus based out of San Francisco. It was there that the man would meet Alfred Kroeber, who gave him the name “Ishi”, which meant “man” in the Yana language – Ishi never gave a personal name, as no other Yahi person was alive to name him on his behalf.
Ishi lived at the Affiliated Colleges Museum in San Francisco for the rest of his life. He did not have true freedom of movement. (Indigenous people in the United States would not see de jure civil rights until 1968.) Ishi worked as a janitor. His relationship with his hosts was, ultimately, fairly affable, but there can be no getting away from the fact that Ishi was held prisoner, only escorted from place to place. Kroeber was, in effect, Ishi’s handler and jailer.
Kroeber, an academic anthropologist, learned a lot from Ishi, about his culture and way of life. Ishi tried his best to integrate. He taught white men how to hunt with bows and arrows, participated in expositions and went to a vaudeville show, which he supposedly called “Heaven for white people”.
Ishi fell ill with tuberculosis, and died five years after his “discovery”, five years in which Ishi was paraded around as the “last wild Indian”, treated as a kind of marvel. His last words were reported to be: “You stay, I go.”
Kroeber furiously petitioned not to have Ishi autopsied after his death, as in the Yahi culture, the body had to remain intact. Ishi was autopsied regardless; his body was cremated, and his brain was preserved in a jar, as if in a final taunt to Kroeber.
In 1929, thirteen years after the death of Ishi, Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora had a baby girl. They named her Ursula.
Ursula Kroeber, who later married the French historian Charles Le Guin, grew up in a household fascinated by anthropology and creation myths. But, years later, she would learn of her father’s relationship with Ishi.
Ishi, a hunter-gatherer considered by white settlers to be primitive, almost childlike in his way of seeing the world, kept locked away in a museum in a bright and bustling city, built on the genocide of his people.
The child, locked in a room, the city of Omelas dependent on its suffering to continue to exist, for its people to continue to be happy, the city’s inhabitants all aware that all this is only possible because of the child’s suffering.
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” confronts us with an unbearable reality: The understanding that it is not hypothetical.
The story of Ishi, and the story of the child in Omelas, is not one-to-one, but it is close enough to be noteworthy. For this reason, some have speculated that Le Guin’s story was a reaction to the knowledge that her father, however positive his intentions, participated in the final indignity visited upon the Yahi people, the sole living representative of a culture, a people, and a language now reduced to a brain, suspended in a jar.
Shortly after Alfred Kroeber’s death in 1960, Ursula Kroeber’s mother wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, an account of Alfred Kroeber’s relationship with Ishi, published in 1961. At that time, Ursula was thirty-two years of age. She likely would have known about Ishi long before that.
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2024 saw Isabel J. Kim release her own response to “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, in a story told with pitch-black humour. The story is titled “Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole”. The title, as I saw someone say, is the trigger warning.
Kim’s story is a better and more vicious satire than Jemisin’s, but the response I saw to it was mixed. Many people acknowledged what a raw and angry place from which the story was written, but others, myself included, regarded it as somewhat hackneyed. How many times can we rehash Omelas? How many more witty ripostes are left in it?
The fact is that writing a creative response to Omelas is about as productive an effort in terms of ethical thought experiments as responding to the trolley problem by saying “Superman could very easily untie all the people on the tracks and get them to safety without having to pull the lever at all.”
Ultimately, the truth contained in Omelas is, as I have said all along, unbearable. Like it or not, the world we live in is built on a foundation of moral injustices and unimaginable cruelties.
The State of California would not exist if not for the extermination of Ishi’s people. The United States would not exist if not for the British Empire. The British Empire would not exist if not for the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest would not have happened if not for the Roman invasion of Britain. The Roman invasion of Britain would not have happened if not for Rome. Rome would not exist if not for the abduction of the Sabine women. And so on.
What recourse do we have to this knowledge, but to confront it? To accept that there is no easy answer, that there is nothing we can do but solemnly face our own complicity in the perpetuation of suffering?
Do we remain in Omelas, in the knowledge that the world we live in is built on bones? Or do we walk away, and try our best to build a better world?
That is, after all, what Le Guin has pointedly asked us all along.
What can you bear to live with?
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Bibliography and further reading
“The Ones Who Stay And Fight”, N. K. Jemisin, Lightspeed Magazine (2018). [TW: Child abuse.]
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”, Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975, original story published 1973). [TW: Child abuse.]
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”, Harlan Ellison, IF: Worlds of Science Fiction (1967). [TW: Pretty much everything.]
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin (1969).
The Word for World Is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin (1976). [TW: Rape.]
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (1974). [TW: Attempted rape.]
“The Cold Equations”, Tom Godwin, Astounding (1954). [TW: Juvenile death.]
“The Men Who Couldn’t Stop Crying, and Other Unbearable Realities”, Jacob Geller, YouTube (2021). [TW: Suicide.]
“The Word For Man Is Ishi”, The Last Archive, Pushkin (2023). [TW: Racism, genocide.]
Ishi in Two Worlds, Theodora Kroeber (1961).
“Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole”, Isabel J. Kim, Clarkesworld (2024). [TW: Child death depicted from the outset.]
This work is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
The illustration for this essay contains elements created by Kookay and 263582 on Pixabay.