A Flawed Utopia

A Flawed Utopia

"With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and gray, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Field boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mudstained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bite. They flare their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of the morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the racecourse snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time tremble and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells." (832, 833)

As a reader we are able to see visually a mental picture of what Ursula K. LeGuin is telling us in "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". LeGuin invites us to become a part of her story by making us become the main character, perhaps a stranger or maybe a faraway visitor of another society with a different seeing eye than the rest of the society of Omelas. We hold our breath as her colorful description of the city of Omelas prance through our minds as the words wraps us in this truly beautiful society, but as we continue on with her narration, we are suddenly engulfed in this society's darkest secret as to how can a society like Omelas be truly this perfect?

Throughout the whole story that LeGuin narrates for us, we feel separated from the society of Omelas and never truly being able to grasp and blend in with the citizens of Omelas. How might this feeling become of importance to us as a reader? LeGuin narrates by stating that the citizens of Omelas are referred to as "they" and as a visitor and a strange newcomer to these people of Omelas, we are referred to as "we" or "us". "They were not less complex than us." (832) this slight difference shows to us that we are different from the people of Omelas and that the people of Omelas are not like us, and that they are very different.

We are then steered from one place to another in Omelas as the narrator tries to take us to see such a joyous and beautiful scene that the festival is creating, where people seem to be festive and busy living such wondrous life. LeGuin never states her true understanding to the society such as their laws or why they do certain things they do, but she translates the story in a way that as a traveling character in her story, we can interpret it however we like. "I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb." (832)

LeGuin then asks us a question, "Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No?" (834) Often we do not believe that a perfect society of Omelas in the beginning could ever exists because there seemed to be no flaws, no cement understanding of two opposite things begin compared, we only see the beauty that Omelas brings to its citizens as the festival is carrying on. We seem to get a sense of a fairytale that would never be able to adapt to our own real society. LeGuin uses significant symbols such as the imagery of light and happiness in the beginning to create to us an emotional response that also allows us to criticize our own society today.

As we get further into our travel in the city of Omelas, the narrator takes us to a place, where this fairytale society can somehow feel realistic, and how is that so? "In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between the cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar." (834) In the beginning, we were welcomed to the city of Omelas in what seems to be pure light, a slight annoyance to the usual society that we're use to being in, that we cannot seem to relate or believe in Omelas' real existence, but after getting a visual understanding that there is a place where often light doesn't get to can be a bit thrilling to know.

"In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner of the farthest from the buckets and the two mops." (834) this imagery that LeGuin uses makes us feel sympathetic to what has happened to this child and why is it in such a miserable condition compared to the rest of the people of Omelas. We immediately wonder why the people of Omelas have continued living their everyday life when something as crude as this is going on. "The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes- the child has no understanding of time or interval- sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. The others never come close, but peer in