Le Guin 3: The Reader’s Labyrinth

Into a Land UnLike Our Own

Somewhere in the middle of my teaching career my entire high school was closed due to low enrollment and we were, all of us, all of the students and teachers remaining, shipped off to a slightly larger high school across town to complete our business. Consolidated. Down-sized. 

To describe it as a space of gross dysfunction, where traumas were largely ignored, long normalized, is to understate it. I could spend a dozen episodes here telling stories about those first years there, the “cell block” styles of the floors and ceilings, the religious fervor assigned to athletics and the students who starred in them, the sexually assaultive behavior on teachers and students both, the “good old boys” principal who kept confiscated drugs in his personal office files, the following principal who stole cash from the student activities funds to pay off his credit cards, and the often-celebrated denials that anything was amiss. One administrator said to me earnestly early on, “We don’t have drug and gang problems here,” just at the break time of a state-level conference which demonstrated how the first problem to overcome was denial. Yes, dozens of episodes of stories. But I’ll spare you the telling and me the memory.

Instead, most concretely though she couldn’t know it at the time, one of my seniors was a veteran of this building compared to my own first arrival there. I was working to get some student schedules corrected in the counseling office and she approached me, asking why I cared about any of that. She was in my 6th period; we barely knew each other, yet. Then she said, “Oh, you’re one of those south side high school teachers, aren’t you?,” naming the building which closed. “You’re supposed to be all caring and shit,” as if such behavior could only be performance. Then, very seriously, she offered, “Let me show you how we do it here.” 

In the following weeks and months, she struggled to help me understand the ethics of the place she had entered adolescence through, that had well-instructed her of the games and strategies required. No smiles could be trusted; no secrets fully divulged. Her I remember vividly and think about fairly often, the workings of any culture upon a psyche, how anything—anything at all—can be normalized, not into a place of health but one of blind spots, of walls we build. 

Well, then she graduated of course, neither of us converted really to the position of the other, and I presume she became some kind of emissary for this way of thinking, for working to perpetuate a culture she had well-learned. I can hope, as I often do, that the rest of the world would continue to shape her and all the students from those early years of our consolidation. 

But then I slap myself, of course. Because there’s nothing really static about culture, nor is there anything really static about how our personalities settle themselves. Any “end product” for either is a scary proposition. Nor is the relationship a mirror exactly, is it? That would suggest a prescribed matching. We might say we see elements of one reflected in the other, but it isn’t a mirror reflection; every metaphor runs its course.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu tried to explain it with the word habitus, when culture offers us a certain internal sense of how to behave. We know it’s currently appropriate to say “Bless you” when someone sneezes, and we do so almost automatically. Our attitudes, our social behaviors, become attuned to the norms of the culture around us. Our morals and ethics, our taboos, the rules of the game. For Bourdieu, this doesn’t mean that we’re merely puppets conforming to the game of culture; he was particularly concerned with individual choice and how it works in such an environment. But it does mean that we make choices often conditioned by these almost unconscious notions of expectation. In each of the communities we inhabit–from family to schools to workplace to slamdancing–we know how to behave. And we know the limits that each community tolerates. Culture works on us like language does.

And what happens when that culture rubs up hard against our individual conscience? As fondly as I remember the frank arguments I had with my new student mentor, I also remember a vow I made to myself. I’d give this place two, maybe three years, and if it couldn’t get its act together by then, I’d leave. I’d walk away. To hell with it. Nothing was worth the exhaustion that the high school exacted on me; I’d get a job somewhere else.

That was the fall of 2006. And, I don’t know exactly what happened after that to my vow. I retired in 2021 from that same high school. 

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I suspect we may be walling ourselves into unhealthy cultures.

 

The Narrator’s Rhetorical Toolkit

There’s more to Bourdieu, of course, much more, and I particularly like how he stakes our cultural territory in terms of cultural and social and symbolic capital and privilege, distinguishing himself from the bolder traps that thinkers like Michael Foucault claimed. But that’s probably at least partly, personal preference. The rock immediately disrupts the flow of the stream, but over time the rock’s sharpest edges are rounded off by it.

What I mean is, Ursula K. Le Guin offers us a narrator for “Omelas” who is seemingly one of the most warm and welcoming. She invites us to the beautiful city of Omelas at its finest hour, a celebration of summer and of life. Her tone is casual, informal, as if she has her arm around our shoulders as she speaks. 

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. … I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. 

Le Guin’s narrator is not part of that world. She is a part of ours. We start by siding with her, wondering with her about this strange place and its extraordinary joys. We, with her, look down upon this Omelas world and wonder about it. From a distance. We do not meet its characters; we do not know their names. We are told they have their stories and complexities, but none of these are shared with us.

There is an intimacy in this story, but it is not to one of the story’s characters; it is with the narrator who speaks to us readers directly. In theater and film, we call this “breaking the fourth wall,” though it is common enough today in film, stage, and story. Omelas presents itself “down there,” for us to observe. We, the narrator and us together, hand in hand, look upon it, chatting. The “story” is up here with us, looking down at Omelas. 

 

Notice how subtle this is, because the events below of Child and mops and feces will shock us to the degree that we almost forget where we are standing. We immediately rise up in protest to the conditions: “Strange and terrible people! I would leave!” Or, “It’s terrible, but a necessary price to pay!” and other such judgments from above. And we’ve spent a fair amount of time with the intimacy and implications of that choice, but here we get to see how Le Guin has set it up.

 

I’ve already said that we readers must meet the dilemma as it is presented; we are not allowed to disengage or set it aside, to escape it or reason it away. By standing with us apart from the scene, Le Guin has offered us something playwright Bertolt Brecht described as the “alienation effect.”

 

Brecht was suspicious of the power of story to lure people in emotionally, to get so caught up in the characters and their plights, the illusions of the stage, that we forget to engage it intellectually. We find ourselves weeping for characters, on the edges of our seats in suspense, celebrating their loves. BookTokers cry out, “This book made me weep for days!” Yeah. Brecht hated all that, because there was something serious his plays were doing, and that emotional seduction made us intellectual dullards. 

 

So he created this kind of theater of alienation. If you’ve seen a Brecht play–The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children maybe–you often see the mechanics of the staging: curtain ropes hang, stage lights get shifted visibly, scenic flats are turned in light, actors change costumes on stage. And you also see these characters breaking the fourth wall, talking to the audience and explaining things. Placards and signs, music and song, would appear at awkward moments to interrupt the story and label what was happening. All to alienate us as viewers, to keep us emotionally outside of the story of the play. 

 

And why? Because for Brecht, art and theater were tools for social change. He wanted us to see the injustices and think about them, not merely feel them. If we were distanced and more thoughtful about our experiences–outside of the cultures in which they occurred, as it were–we could see them more plainly. We would be more likely to be empowered to make change. 

 

And here is Le Guin, arm around our shoulders, together the two of us looking down at Omelas and rebuilding the sets together. If she did all the work for us and told us a story in a typical way, we might simply consume the story passively as we do so many others. 

 

I like to think of her as a bit of a provocateur, in this sense. Because, of course, this comfortable friendly chat she offers is a ruse:

 

O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.

 

And soon after she writes:

 

I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.

 

How many writers or narrators allow us to make of their world what we wish? This isn’t just a fantasy story, then, we know. It’s a collaborative project. We—Ursula and I—are building a world together. She tells us what she wants in hers and she invites us to vary it any way we want. We can quote “imagine it as your fancy bids.”

 

Oh, treacherous woman! And who I am accusing here is a bit ambiguous. I mentioned earlier in our series that I imagined a rare case where narrator and author were the same where before I so often champion the idea that a speaker or narrator is another character quite apart from the author, a vital distinction which builds all kinds of ironic possibilities. 

 

But here–standing apart and co-creating as we are–we are sharing in authorship of Omelas. In this way Le Guin makes herself as author and the narrator difficult to distinguish from each other. If we are nearly authors of the city, who else could be speaking to us about it? At the same time, Le Guin’s narrator could well be a character like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, not Dostoevsky at all, but an author of fables nonetheless, who shares them with Aloysha and others. Significantly, though, this authorlike narrator character is also never named, and so by omission Le Guin allows us to trust the narrator’s chumminess just as we might trust Le Guin herself. 

 

But I called her–whether author or narrator, you decide–treacherous. Part of the treachery is in this manipulation of our relationship with her. She allows us to trust her as an author; she shares our understanding of wonder and strangeness of the Omelas culture; and she works alongside us to shape it together. And this co-creation operates basically within a single enormous paragraph of city-building, nearly a quarter of the entire story. The first ⅔ of the story is this relationship-building, this establishment of a theater of alienation, where we are become like anthropologists, examining the psychologies of these folks. And we are its architects, building the utopias we always wanted for ourselves, because the blueprint utopia of a perfect static end society is what we always want–and she knows we want it.

 

The treachery, then, we know. After building the relationship, our author/narrator/character springs the single unassailable condition of the Suffering Child. She does not allow us to rewrite it. We are complicit in building a utopia dependent upon suffering and privilege. And let’s be clear: our narrator knew of this condition from its beginning; we did not. She led us into the trap. 

 

Critic Shoshana Knapp goes much further than I do in this accusation. She says that the real evil of the story occurs with our narrator, and it’s hard to argue with her. We’ve already established that the story happens “up here,” apart from the city below, where we form a working relationship with her. At least philosopher William James, when he presented his case of the Suffering Child, kept the entire argument abstracted and he was as morally outraged as we are, that “strenuous mood” we’ve spoken of. In Knapp’s view, Le Guin’s narrator is more a mad scientist, a villain, concocting this foul little gem for us. And if so, then the narrator is as responsible for the outrage as we are for joining with her in the experiment. You and I understand, after all: cultures are not the creation of a single individual but the work of all of us collectively. But this entire story outrages, not simply because of the kid in the closet, but because we have built it with the narrator. We have collectively become Ivan Karamazov’s idea of God. And for us as readers, there is absolutely no one to ally ourselves with, no character to root for, especially not the narrator. We are left alone in our responsibility. 

 

Critic Carol Stevens stretches this point to horror. Real cultures are not mirrors; we have a relationship with them at some level. But what about invented worlds? Invented utopias? Aren’t they mirrors of the mind which created them? Our ultimate ideals? That’s pretty scary, because, says Stevens, the narrator doesn’t put the Suffering Child in the story to trap us. She places it there because quote “she knew we need it there.” 

 

She knew we need it there. Is that true? Do we need terror and misery to believe in light and joy? Are we the people of Omelas who have found their joy and beauty empowered by the knowledge of that child? Stevens writes that the scapegoat child is:

 

“the only thing in the story she can be absolutely certain we’ve already created for ourselves, the one thing that really is fundamental for our culture to function as we experience it most of the time.”

 

Our narrator/Le Guin may not know what our different Omelas cities would look like. She only knows that each of them had suffering somewhere. We’re not merely complicit in building this perfect city arm in arm with the mad scientist, we’re complicit because we already believe that it’s built upon pain.

 

For Brecht’s theater, the alienation effect was one directed to political purpose. For Le Guin, the machinery of this story, the open co-creation of it, we might see as the morality of art and our complicity in it, the ethical implications of storytelling and human accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More.

 

Choices and Subversions

 

Back when we talked about fantasy as a genre, I suggested that it wasn’t the tropes of the genre which ruined a story but how predictably or unimaginatively they were used. It’s not that a good fantasy doesn’t have a tricky prophecy, for instance, but it’s what the author does with the tricky prophecy to advance her story in creative or unexpected ways.

 

Le Guin, no amateur at fantasy worlds, plays and subverts tropes even in this little four-page short story. Obviously, the utopian city idea itself is grossly subverted by our Child figure. But whereas many worlds have a king or elder whose wisdom can solve the problems we meet, Le Guin does away with the idea of a king completely. And what elders might be present have long ago expected everyone to accept the Suffering Child just as they have. There is no solution forthcoming, not unless our reader-now-co-author can write one. And where a secret room or Hogwarts chamber always hides a dark secret, Le Guin drags that secret into the open, one known by everybody. No one can hide behind ignorance of the horror occurring here, nor do they. As we’ve suggested, they learn to accept it, even grow because of it, come to understand that the terms of the utopia, that “depends upon,” is both shame and boon, tragedy and creative force. 

 

But a tragedy and creative force for what, exactly? Art? Story? Thought? Beauty? I want to take a few moments to wrestle with some other more subtle but necessary questions which arise from the story–some of which we’ll address in the next episode, as well. But they’re important, because Le Guin is most definitely conscious of them. The first is a critique of her utopia–excuse me, our utopia—and it’s one that perhaps a casual reader of fantasy has grown so accustomed to that it wasn’t noticed. Or it’s one that we were so casual about in our assembly of the society that we did not question it. It’s an element normalized in our culture talk and it appears consistently across the descriptions of the city: this world is highly and significantly gendered. 

 

We have images of “master workmen” and fat old ladies “passing out flowers from a basket.” We have images of men in tall authority and women in domesticity and caregiving. The sole artist in the story is a boy. Even the utopia image of the city is one we might find from Plato or from Bellamy’s novel. My point is that Le Guin takes a lot of time to knock down a lot of tropes; she takes a lot of time to argue with us about the nature of happiness and religion, about sex and about the nature of evil. But she allows the imagined Omelas to remain passively, quietly patriarchal. 

 

Now I suppose you and I, reading this story and interested in the breadth of literature and artistic expression, might imagine that any perfect society would itself kind of transcend those gender roles, would imagine itself as something a little less imbalanced in power and responsibility. Only our Suffering Child is genderless, and that is because we call the child an “it” to dehumanize it. But it also suggests that anyone, male or female or non-binary, might suffer equally. (And, speaking of which, there seems nothing apart from the implied orgy itself which suggests much beyond heteronormativity.) 

 

Too much? Too miniscule a point? Well, let me say again that if we know much about Le Guin the anarchic feminist, this seems particularly “off point.” Perhaps there is a larger reason for it.

 

So let’s turn a bit to a more apparent take on the Omelas utopia. By now, we’ve made the case that the entire scene could be an allegory for the Western powers or wealth against the suffering of the developing world upon which its wealth and privilege is dependent, the walled garden. Let’s mention here, too, that there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of diversity in Omelas. All speak one language, celebrate one celebration, and we might presume is one-complected. N.K. Jemisin points out that “race is not mentioned at all.” This is not a world of diversity, this perfect place, but one of conformity, of normalization, of sameness.This, too, seems a strange omission for Le Guin, hyper-conscious as she is about the need for different voices in healthy cultures.

 

For those who need such things, Le Guin in one interview said that the story reflects “the dilemma of the American conscience.” So yes, she is quite aware of these imbalances. She is counting on the reader-author-co-creator of Omelas to see and even to accept that utopia is dependent upon these things, on a certain level of tidy gender tradition and a certain presumption that wealth of all kinds “depends upon” another’s suffering. So when Carol Stevens says earlier that the narrator/Le Guin put the child there because she “knew we need it there,” we can see that understanding implicit in our co-creation. Critic David Brooks says that “many of us live in societies where prosperity depends on some faraway child in the basement.” And Annabel Herzog writes that neoliberal capitalism is a narrative of “freedom and self-realization … founded on intrinsic injustices that persist because of [our idea] of the good life,” that the “sacrifice of some seems to be the necessary condition for late capitalist society’s comfort and happiness.” Those who have not read any of the works of Chinua Achebe might add him to your reading list on this front. 

 

Not to pound this in, but it’s what we can call a “hegemonic centrism,” this idea that Eurocentrism, anthropocentrism, colonialism, and racism–all of these explain how exploitation relies on ideologies of domination by a single central culture. Outside of the hegemony, there is only a hidden, exploited Other, an “it” which we acknowledge as the price for our comfort.

 

So yes, this relationship, this privilege built upon suffering, is implicit, inherent in our thinking, part of our habitus. 

 

We know it. Le Guin knows it. So why is it, we might ask, that so long as we have been co-authoring this utopic city of Omelas, that almost none of us changed those rules? Why didn’t we change the patriarchal norms? Why didn’t we make the city larger, more diverse, global? Why did so many of us as readers complacently accept the city’s roles and norms as presented to us? What does our failure to co-author these injustices away suggest? Le Guin writes in the story, “One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.” Ouch.

 

Well, perhaps that Stevens and Le Guin were right: inside our habitus, we have come to understand that we need the Suffering Child there. That our perfect world depends upon someone else not having it. Maybe it’s a colonial politics of neoliberalism, maybe race, maybe gender, maybe disability or even ecology–the planet must suffer for me.

 

And our narrator-author set us up for all of these accusations, too. 

 

And So We Walk Away?

 

Culture is not a mirror, exactly, but our imagination of utopia certainly must be, formed as it is from our ideals, from the best perfection we can imagine, that blueprint or compass for the moral and ethical future. It’s the ideology for change we bring to our culture, the impetus for reform or the absence of it.  

 

It’s little wonder, faced with all of these mirrors and accusations and moral repulsions and strenuous moods, that we often automatically agree with those who leave Omelas by story’s end. “I would leave!” some shout in the classrooms. “I would stay; it’s a small price to pay,” shout others. 

 

We can’t be sure what Le Guin means by “walking away” in the context we’ve offered here. Is it, as most imagine, an act of dissent, of our ethical rejection? “I refuse to accept these conditions!” (It sounds a bit like Ivan’s refusal to live in God’s promise.) If so, let’s not forget here that we are responsible as co-authors of this utopia. What exactly are we leaving and what are we carrying with us?

 

Or is it something less than this, merely an abdication of responsibility? “It’s not my business! I’m not involved in this!” Importantly, when these people leave the city, the child remains. They don’t take the Sufferer with them. Is that really the morally sound choice? 

 

Howard Zinn, in his essay on Artists in Times of War, wonders at how our language teaches us that abdication of responsibility is a norm, a habitus, that we too easily accept. We are aligned, he says, by what we do, our professions. Business people do business, actors act, math teachers teach math, and so on. It’s not our business, we sometimes reason, to challenge the culture foundations that have assigned our roles. We abdicate our responsibilities to injustice done for our benefit. But Zinn reminds us, too, that everyone is a citizen, and that citizens are experts at their own moral positions; we are allowed our opinions.

 

So if we leave, where are we going? And what do we imagine we are leaving behind? In the story, Le Guin says that 

 

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. 

 

Our narrator refuses to describe it, or cannot. Is it because she and we cannot conceive of a world not built on some form of exploitation? If this is true, then we are in real trouble, because we must not forget the role of the utopia: to provide us a moral compass, to help us better understand our principles. What does it mean when a utopia is unimaginable?  

 

This is why I suggest that Le Guin’s thorny utopia is not meant to be answered, not this way. It’s Brecht’s alienation effect: it summons in us a defensive outrage, but as much, it poses intellectual questions about our flawed idealism. If these are the ideals which make our utopia, of what are we made, and how do we shake ourselves out? If so many of us have read this short story and been trapped the same as those before us, is our entire culture predicated on this gross hideous bargain and we are blind to it?

 

In a word, yes. We walk by the painting by Gainsborough and give it a quick glance, missing its omissions. Nothing wrong here. We pepper our gardens with chemicals to create a space of beauty, free from weeds and the rest of nature we discriminate against. This is fine. We take a cruise which rides toxically over its ports of call, feeding money only to those who perform for our comfort. Just another Tuesday. Nothing to see here. At least the coffee’s still hot. It’s only a flesh wound. Smile and wave, boys, smile and wave. Keep calm and carry on.  I wonder what it means that so many phrases like this hover under and around our discourse?

 

And it’s easy to suggest, too easy to imply, that the people of Omelas are evil for allowing the suffering to continue, that the narrator is evil for setting we readers up for this mirror trap, that the people who leave are evil for abdicating their responsibilities to change. I won’t argue against any of these readings, but I will suggest that there is nothing sinister or diabolical about any of these characters. No one is twirling an oily moustache or brewing anything in a cauldron. If anyone in the story is evil, it is a truly banal evil, the kind Hannah Arendt told us about when describing the Nuremberg Trials, the kind that Le Guin tells us about directly in the story when she writes:

 

This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. 

 

If there is evil in Omelas, evil in the characters, or evil in us, it is terribly boring in its normalcy, so empty of self-reflection and devoted to conformity that we scarcely recognize it as a choice at all. And there, with no little ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, is where the story has its power.

How Do I Teach this Nightmare?

 

It’s true that, for many students, confronting every facet of the Omelas story is simply not in their capacity. It can be hugely demoralizing, accusing, defaming; it can rob us of our hope and expectation for change, that we cannot see a way out of our own subconscious self-absorption. And we simply must not leave it there. 

 

After all, Brecht’s concept of what he called Epic Theatre, his idea of alienation, was to foster change, to provoke an intellectualization of the problem so that we are not so overcome by despair or get lost in the plotting. But for younger students, say most high school students, getting to that is not easy, and I am not certain I would recommend teaching the story if this is as far as we can go with it. If we see the story merely as the question of “Stay or Go,” we absolutely underrepresent what Le Guin is up to. But once we go down the paths we’ve taken these past few episodes, we can start getting into tougher, personal territory, riskier territory. 

 

And that’s much of what we’ll be looking at in our next episode, our last formal one, on Omelas. How we respond. I think it’s critical to bringing our conversation together.

 

I should also point out here that the first two episodes of our talk on this story have produced several questions from you, and I will try to address these questions after we wind up the planned talks here, probably in a special episode that follows. So in the meantime, if you’ve been listening and have questions or challenges or laments about what we’ve been talking about, write to me and let me know. I’ll try to fit the questions in on the follow-up episode and if I can’t get to yours, I’ll be sure to write you back personally. (Or, if you’re listening some time after August 2025 when this is airing, I’ll just write you back.) Just go to the website, Waywords Studio dot com and send your message or go to the link in the Show Notes called Mailbag!

 

In the meantime, for teachers, here are a couple of ideas you can work with until we get to next week’s talk.

 

• Intellectualize Le Guin’s techniques. Have students in groups annotate the story specifically for the unusual approaches of her narrator and draw conclusions on the narrator’s character. 
• Journals or response videos. Have students describe their own emotional responses to the narrator’s invitations. Did they actually consider them or gloss over them? Did they draw you into the story? What do your choices to participate suggest? If you glossed over them, why didn’t you want to participate?
• Unimaginability. Have students try to imagine the space that Le Guin’s narrator cannot (or refuses to). From there, students can compare and ask questions about their own designs (which is what the narrator wanted, anyway). What got better? How and why?

 

My imagined utopia right now is fairly straightforward: Cookies and a nap. And so long as I don’t think overhard about where the sugar came from, the cocoa for the chocolate chips, the factory conditions for the oven manufacture, the consequences for the natural gas I use, or the hazards where the nap blanket was sewn, I’m sure it will be bliss.

 

And while I’m settling in, do me a favor? 

 

Read me something.

 

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

 

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

 

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

 

Adams, Rebecca. “Narrative Voice and Unimaginability of the Utopian ‘Feminine’ in Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.’” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 35–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719024. 

 

Collins, Jerre. “Leaving Omelas: Questions of Faith and Understanding.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 525–35.

 

Faragher, Julia. “Rethinking Utopia.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, edited by Ann Charters, Bedford/St Martins, 2003, p. 902.

 

Fitting, Peter. “Readers and Responsibility: A Reply to Ken Roemer.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 24–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719022. 

 

Herzog, Annabel. “Dilemmas of Political Agency and Sovereignty: The Omelian Allegory.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 38, no. 4, 2021, pp. 71–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420967436.

 

Khanna, Lee Cullen. “Beyond Omelas: Utopia and Gender.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 48–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719025. 

 

Knapp, Shoshana. “The Morality of Creation: Dostoevsky and William James in Le Guin’s ‘Omelas.’” The Journal of Narrative Technique, vol. 15, no. 1, 1985, pp. 75–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30225113. 

 

Langbauer, Laurie. “Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin.” ELH, vol. 75, no. 1, 2008, pp. 89–108. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029586. 

 

Roemer, Kenneth M. “The Talking Porcupine Liberates Utopia: Le Guin’s ‘Omelas’ as Pretext to the Dance.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 6–18. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719020. 

 

Stevens, Carol D. “A Response to Ken Roemer.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 30–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719023. 

 

Wyman, Sarah. “Reading Through Fictions in Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 25, no. 4, Informa UK Limited, 2012, pp. 228–232.

 

Scapegoat, Complicity, Ethics, Philosophy, AccountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, Uncertainty, Fantasy, Privilege, Happiness, colonialism, globalization, eurocentrism, racism, sexism, feminism