In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula Le Guin shows us a utopian society that has one major flaw. There is a child suffering for the sake of the community by being thrown in a room and basically left to suffer for the rest of its life. The child is secluded and not given enough to eat, but the text never says why the child is kept in that room. All it says is “Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect” (91). This raises the question, is a utopian society possible without pain and suffering?
Everyone in the city finds out about the child between the ages of 8 and 12, so they come to accept the child’s presence over the years. This makes the people of Omelas be thankful for everything they have even more because they have seen extreme suffering. You cannot truly appreciate life and the beauty of it without experiencing the extreme opposite. I do not think a utopian society is possible without suffering.
However, if there is even one child dealing with severe pain, then it is not a perfect society. How can they live with themselves knowing they are making an innocent child suffer just because they want to continue living in their perfect world? It is completely impossible for a society to exist without any pain or suffering in it. People often experience this on a daily basis, whether it is extreme or only minor, so a society free of pain is unattainable.
There are people in the city of Omelas who do walk away once they find out about the child. Are they being more heroic or less than the people who stay? I believe that walking away from a problem is the most cowardly way of dealing with it, but the people who do stay are not much better. No one in this story is a hero, but who is making the better decision?
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I agree. I feel that a society cannot exist without suffering. I feel that the "omelas" story showed us that there is always suffering even in an utopian community. In our society, we experience suffering in different ways other than a child sitting in a cold, dark room alone. No one in our country is always happy. There is always sadness and anger. There is a huge range of emotions and life is about experiencing all of them.
ReplyDeleteNot only that but we use opposites to help define things. For example, we define lightness by knowing what darkness is. We know something is hot becuase it is not cold. This means that we know if were happy by knowing what saddness and suffering is. So happiness cannot exist without some suffering.
And in response to if the people of Omelas were heroic? No I do not feel like they were. They were walking away from a situation that needed solving. I feel like they were cowards for not standind up for what they believed in. To really help a situation they should have stayed there and solved it.
A positive cannot exist without a negative, you cannot have one without the other. If we had light, and no dark, how would we be able to judge the brightness of light? Light is brighter relative to darkness. Therefore, to know joy, we must also know suffering. In focusing solely on the positive (that is, trying to make a utopian society), we may overlook what the real situation is, and what we can do rather than what we should do. That sort of fantastical dreaming could ironically create a dystopia.
ReplyDeleteSo I agree with you in that respect.
But as to your question about how they can live with the fact that their joy is at the expense of another, we may look no further than our own lives as an example. How do you live with yourself knowing that the comfy shirt you're wearing was made by an abused, underpaid sweatshop worker in a backwards country?
The truth is that, if we are not selfish creatures, we are at the very least self-centered. And with good reason. You need to help yourself before helping others. Except, in this case, we're not just surviving, we're /thriving/ off of the expense of others. We don't always acknowledge this, so we live with ourselves through ignorance. And when we do note our capitalizing over the less fortunate, we live with guilt.
So when you ask if the ones who leave Omelas are heroes, I say they absolutely are, at least to some degree. You could argue that it's a sin of omission (rather than commission), to leave without saving the child, but look at what they DID do. They walked away from that lavish life and took the step in the right direction. For all we know, they could be incapable of freeing the depraved child within their own power. After all, are you capable, within your own means, to give that sweatshop worker a better life? Most likely not. But you can do the little things (like petitioning the company that abuses the workers) that can have more impact than you'd at first imagine.
I completely agree with Lindsey. Their can never be a utopia if not everyone is happy. Only by that child suffering and living in the same city as everyone else, it doesnt allow the city to be utopia.
ReplyDeletePeople that walked away are cowards but people who actually stayed are even worse because they live without caring of some other childs life. Just maybe, one of those people who did walk away try looking for help but never got help was because probably nobody beleived him as soon as he mentioned utopia.
There will never be a utopia because no one is perfect and everyone would have to have the same opinion which will never happen.
I do not think a utopia is possible in this story or in real life. For one thing, that child is suffering greatly.
ReplyDeleteIn the world that we are in, People are not perfect and people are always going to strive to be better. With this said people are going to compete, to have the better wife, the better car, etc. So, the winner will be happy but the loser won't be, so the utopia would not be possible because not everyone is happy all the time.
I also agree with concepcione, that the people who stay are bigger cowards. And, we really don't know what those other people did when they left. They really could have been trying to help the girl out but we really don't know. But, we do know that a utopia is never going to be possible.
I agree. I don't believe that an ideal utopia can exist without some sort of suffering to compare the "perfection" to. But the fact that suffering exists proves that it is not a utopia at all. Personally, I think a society where each person at one point experiences some sort of suffering would be the more ideal society so as to unite the citizens amongst the suffering as opposed everyone living their perfect lives while one person suffers alone.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that niether the person who walks away or the person who stays in omelas is the hero for doing what they do. I definitely don't agree with those who stay because they continue to reap the benefits of the city that is at faul and don't bother to do anything to fix it. Although those who leave don't do anything to help the suffering child, they do decide to leave the utopia and discontinue their perfect life based on their new found knowledge. So in a way they might realize that they can't do anything to fix this society, but decide to join another with values that they actually believe in.
I think that there is no way that utopias can exist because there is no way that an entire group of people can all be happy. For every positive the is a negative, a price. In Omelas the price is the suffering of a child.
ReplyDeleteEveryone in Omelas knows about the intense suffering that the child must go through for the rest of them to be happy. After seeing the child the people split into two groups; the ones who see it and come to terms with it by finding some reason to justify it, and the ones who see it and can't deal with it so they just leave. In my opinion these groups are equally terrible. The people who justify it to themselves are basically choosing to ignore the child and disregarding what it goes through because they want to be happy. The ones who leave are just giant cowards. If they really cared they wouldn't just take off without a word, they would stay and try to find a way to stop the great injustice that is happening.
“We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering” (Victor Frankl). Suffering in itself strengthens the soul and makes us stronger individuals. To imagine a world without suffering is impossible, for without suffering we as a society could not define happiness. We could not have old without new, clean without messy, light without darkness. When we experience suffering it makes one appreciate joy to the fullest for we truly understand heartbreak and pain.
ReplyDeleteTo comment on the few that leave, they leave in silent protest, never to return. Those individuals leave “through the beautiful gates” and grasslands, “to a place even less imaginable to the most of us than the city of happiness”. There leave is credible, honorable even for although the narrator “cannot describe it at all,” the protestors themselves “seem to know where they are going”. The disturbance they experienced caused the individuals to understand the immorality of the suffering child. Is it too much to ask everyone to give up a bit of joy to save one child’s life from torture and pain? Did Jesus not teach us in the parable of the lost sheep the importance of life? The shepherd left his 99 other sheep just to save the one he lost, for his life was of great value.
The desolate child is the foundation on which the “beautiful” utopian society rests on. In the famous words of Honore de Balzac, “behind every great fortune there is a crime,” this crime being the false pretenses upon which the utopian society stands. The Omelas, like the society in the novel The Giver, written by Lois Lowry, is a seemingly ideal world, a world without conflict, inequality, or injustice. However when Jonas, the central character of the novel, is lead to an unnamed man, a man titled “The Giver”, he begins to sense the dark secrets that lie beneath the delicate perfection of his seemingly unblemished world. This novel, like the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” questions every value we as a society take for granted, and reexamines our deeply treasured beliefs.
Utopias are nothing but fantasies. It is impossible for happiness to exist amongst all people simply because happiness means different things to different people. Suffering is inevitable. Suffering exists because humans were given free will. If all of us were hardwired to be flawless individuals, much suffering would be eliminated. So would if we were given a choice? Would you opt to have suffering eliminated if that also meant your free will was taken away?
ReplyDeleteSuffering allows us to grow as people. Whenever we fail, we learn what it takes to succeed in the future. When you fail an exam, you suffer a bad grade yet gain a knowledge on how to avoid failure from happening again. We would never know happiness if we never experienced sadness. We would never want to push ourselves to success if we never felt the emptiness of failure. Suffering allows us to become the best version of ourselves.
Now you may think it was wrong of those who walked away from Omelas, but in reality is it really that absurd? Selfishness is built into human nature. It is part of the reason why we are flawed creations. If we were totally selfless there would be no such thing as poverty, or hunger. Unfortunately this is not the case because we are imperfect. What is more valuable to you, free will or striving for unobtainable utopia?
I personally believe that this story was a parallel to what we see everyday. they talk of the child suffering for the happiness of hundreds and no one doing anything about it. this mirrors society because we walk just about anywhere and you see someone who's homeless, struggling, and is in dire need of our help, but we do not always lend the helping hand. For example, you walk around New York City and one does not always choose to throw change in that homeless person's cup. Although the child is being horrifyingly mistreated, it receives no help from anyone around it. This story i feel was created to make you think about just this. without the example of sorrow, what do we have to compare to happiness and to know that we truly are happy. it's a natural part of life to be sad, just as it is to be happy.
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of the previous responses. A utopian society cannot exist. Perfection is unattainable, because if a world were perfect, there would be nothing to compare it to. So then how would you know it was perfect? The negative experiences that would need to be eliminated in order for a society to be perfect would need to be present in order for you to know they exist. So, if they exist, then the society cannot be perfect. This paradox is conveyed in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." The society mentioned is not perfect, since the child is suffering. The people who live in Omelas are living in happiness on account of one sad child. I personally would never be able to live a happy life knowing that my happiness is the result of the misery of another -- especially a vulnerable child. Therefore, the ones who walk away are less at fault than those who stay and feed off of the sadness of the child. I've always been a problem-solver, so I would give the citizens of Omelas a chance to solve the problem. However, if the problem is out of their reach, then the next best thing is to walk away and not allow yourself to be a part of such a blindly corrupt society. I believe that this choice to take another path leading basically anywhere (since the title/story does not specify where the ones who walk away are headed) and start an improved society is the reason why the title is "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," rather than "The Ones Who Stay and Live in Omelas." Also, Le Guin ends her story as follows: "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 that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from
ReplyDeleteOmelas." I believe that the place to which "The Ones Who Walk Away" are headed is not exactly a place but a state of mind, full of ease, knowledge, wisdom, and happiness.