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| "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" - Ursula K. LeGuin | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 10 2014, 11:33 PM (202 Views) | |
| Liquid Sky | May 10 2014, 11:33 PM Post #1 |
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"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a 1973 short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is a philosophical parable with a sparse plot featuring bare and abstract descriptions of characters; the city of Omelas is the primary focus of the narrative. [1] "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" was nominated for the Locus Award for Best Short Fiction in 1974 [2] and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974 Publication [edit] Le Guin's story was originally published in New Dimensions 3, a hard-cover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973. In the story, Omelas is a utopian city of happiness and delight, whose inhabitants are intelligent and cultured. Everything about Omelas is pleasing, except for the city's one Atrocity: the good fortune of Omelas requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness and misery, and that all her citizens should be told of this upon coming of age. After being exposed to the truth, most of the people of Omelas are initially shocked and disgusted, but are ultimately able to come to terms with the fact and resolve to live their lives in such a manner as to make the suffering of the unfortunate child acceptable. However, a few citizens, young and old, silently walk away from the city, and no one knows where they go. The story ends with "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." Background and themes [edit] "The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition." The quote from William James is: Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions 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 specifical 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? [6][7] Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror. "[… People ask me] 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?" Text: http://iweb.tntech.edu/jcbaker/The%20Ones%20Who%20Walked%20Away%20from%20Omelas.pdf Audio: http://jlschwennen.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/ones-who-walk-away.mp3 Poste Edited by Liquid Sky, May 11 2014, 12:31 AM.
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| AquarianLove | May 15 2014, 04:11 PM Post #2 |
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Don't remember reading this story, but read a lot of her stories over the years.. Omelas is like that place where we all want to live happy and carefree, but the price of this happy place is a child's misery. This story has a lot of dimensions and makes you deep think. |
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3:02 PM Jul 11