In 1-2 pages, answer the following prompt:
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” contains patterns and themes remarkably similar to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” What are they? Would you say that they have similar messages for their readers? If so, how so? If not, how are their messages different? Is the child in the story a scapegoat, like Tessie, or is another mechanism at work?
In developing an interpretation of the story’s message, consider William James (1891) passage, from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, that supposedly inspired Le Guin to write this piece:
“[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which … millions [are] kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”
Is the utopia of Le Guin’s story a hideous thing? Do we damn ourselves for our enjoyment of its benefits? What are our alternatives?
In this context, what do we make of the suggestion made by the Omelas/Salem O palindrome that the story is about US society? Or rather, how is Omelas a microcosm of Canadian society? Upon which historical injustice is the prosperity of Canadian society constructed? How does this injustice continue in the present? How would addressing it result in a shift in the societal mechanisms that create prosperity? Is justice for the child in the story possible, or desirable?
Finally, what does it mean to walk away from Omelas? Is walking away enough? What would you do? Would you walk away or remain in the city, enjoying its pleasures? If you choose to remain, what does one do with the knowledge of the city’s hidden child?
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