The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Essay | Critical Essay #3

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas Critical Essay #3

In the following essay, Collins analyzes "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as an allegory of modern American morality.

Ursula Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," subtitled "Variations on a Theme by William James," is a critique of American moral life. At least that is what Ms. Le Guin tells us in the introduction she added when the story was collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975). First she quotes the passage from James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" to which the subtitle refers:

[I]f 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 torment, what except a specifical and...
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