the ones who walk away from omelas by ursula leguin

In supposing that the reader does not believe the scene, the narrator gestures toward the story’s explicitly allegorical-rather than realistic-presentation.

Thus, the reader’s imagination is tested once again.

The narrator again breaks the fourth wall as they ask readers whether they believe in the scene. This is significant because it lays the groundwork for what the narrator will later reveal about these children’s coming of age. Again, the narrator pays special attention to the children of Omelas, describing their joy and emotional attentiveness to their horses, and generally portraying childhood in Omelas as idealistic. The theme of the individual versus society resurfaces as the narrator focuses on the city’s society moving as one organic being. These differences invite the audience to compare Omelas to their own society and examine which parts of it may be destructive.Īfter exploring happiness in Omelas at length, the narrator returns to the picturesque scene of the Festival of Summer. Notably, many aspects and inventions of modern society are absent from the narrator’s summation of what is allowed in the city according to their tripartite distinction, and this is presumably because these things fall into the “destructive” category. In this way, the narrator further reinforces the idea that the story is to be read as an allegory in which the society of Omelas is a stand-in for the ideal society. Here, the narrator explicitly directs the reader to use their imagination to fill in the details of Omelas for themselves, and in doing so reveals that Omelas is not an actual place so much as an idea. The narrator continues to emphasize the theme of happiness and suffering by describing in greater detail the principles on which Omelas’s happiness is founded, and introducing the concepts of necessity and destructiveness as important variables in calculating that happiness.

The ones who walk away from omelas by ursula leguin