Le Guin's story stems (she says) from Henry(?) James --
a philosophical question: could one be happy in a world
that provided every perfection one could wish IF it
depended on one person living in absolute misery.
That's a child in the basement -- girl or boy makes no
difference. The difference Le Guin posits is important:
everyone in Omelas KNOWS about the child. (We create a
culture with lots and lots of people living in misery,
but we are very very careful not to 'see' them.)
In Omelas, everything is perfect (even the narrative voice
that reminds us how perfect it is -- you want orgies? OK,
you can have orgies, but they'll be nice ones). And, sometimes,
someone walks away. They don't know what they're walking TO,
but they know very well what they're walking away FROM.
I don't think it resembles Jackson's Lottery all that much.
No one questions the lottery except the woman who gets
stoned. Even her kids cooperate. (And we see that she's a
nice average housewife type who cleaned up the kitchen before
she came to her death.) And no one knows why they have the
lottery; it's a custom, that's all, and there's a saying that
if they don't have it they won't have a good year. That kind
of residual superstition does occur, in many forms, but it's
usually subconscious. Le Guin does not allow that comfortable
out.
Martha Bartter
Truman State University
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