The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a story by Ursula Le Guin which is one of my favorite stories that questions morality, happiness and humanism. The story is not just moving but it makes you ask your personal relationship to the less fortunate people around you. It makes you think why we allow such cruel and inhumane action towards a certain person or group.


"...the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. ...One thing I know there is none of Omelas is guilt."

"In the basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its more spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from the cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps, it was born defective, or perhaps it becomes imbecile through fear, malnutrition and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionaly fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disapper. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good," it says. "Please let me out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whinning, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually."

"...They all know it has to be there. ...they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdoms of their scholars, the skills of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery."


Whenever I read the this story, I cannot understand the cruelty that people have that makes them endure the condition of the poor families. The story emphasizes the rights of a child. I cannot say anything more.