SOURCE: Collins, Jerre. “Leaving Omelas: Questions of Faith and Understanding.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no. 4 (fall 1990): 525-35.

In the following essay, Collins discusses Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a piece of sociopolitical fiction, and asks why this and other such stories have not succeeded in transforming the American conscience.

Ursula Le Guin's short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” subtitled “Variations on a theme by William James,” is a critique of American moral life.¹ At least that is what Ms. Le Guin tells us in the introduction she added when the story was collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975). First she quotes the passage from James's “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” to which the subtitle refers:

[I]f the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone...