The title of the story tells us that there is a significant difference between the ones who leave the townsfolkship and those who stay. Everyone in the town has make used to the knowledge of the abject child, and everyone apparently has gone through a process touching from shock, disgust, anger, rage, and so on, until they reach a place of numb credence of the trade-off between the town's blessedness and the child's pain: "Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the fantastic justice of veracity and to accept it" (831). However, some cannot bear this "reality" and they leave the town, apparently moved by their conscience or disgust or some other inner compulsion. They do not rescue or attempt to rescue the child, for they are as convinced as the ones who remain that the child is beyond rescuing. Where these few go when they leave Omelas is important to Le Guin because she ends the story considering their destination:
The place they go towards is a place fifty-fifty less imaginable to intimately of us than the city of unhappiness. I cannot describe it at all. it is possible that it does not exist. But they search to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas 9831).
The story itself is wide-eyed: here is a happy town whose happiness dep
ends on a child's pathetic. To ease the child's suffering is to destroy the town's happiness. Everyone in the town is at first scare upon learning of the child's suffering, but everyone also comes to accept the delicate equilibrize between the happy town and the miserable child.
Le Guin uses her self-conscious, artificial, post-modern cash advance because, perhaps, she feels that such an annoying style is the only way to fascinate across a subject or an image which has become too familiar to the world today. She has chosen not to tell the story in a traditional, narrative way in order to throw the reader off stride, to make it unvoiced to know what the author or narrator is up to until the story is more than half finished.
The town she describes is, more or less, any town, or at least any town at its best. But it is at the same time not a town which we feel entirely at home in. The ambiguities and vagueness she continually introduces remind us that she is writing a story which is not "real" and that we are reading that story. She refuses to enchant lost in the telling of the story or to allow us to get lost in such a tale. She keeps the story from bonny an "entertainment" by keeping its surface slippery, uncertain. She tells us that the hoi polloi of omelas could have "central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of improbable devices. . . . Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter" (828). She describes different aspects of the town and its people at length, and then either withdraws the description or contradicts it. All that matters is that this is a relatively happy town, like most towns, and that its happiness depends on accepting the suffering of an innocent child.
The "message" of the story is that in order for any human happiness to exist, the suffering of others, especially children, must be ignored or rationalized. Le Guin she wants us to reflect on the fact that at every moment in the world such exorbitant suffering is taking place,
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