Sacrifice, Consent, and Complicity: A Comparative Study of Le Guin’s Omelas and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
The Three Ghosts of Science Fiction Past, Present, and FutureThe story opens with a dreamlike description of the joy of the people of Omelas, evoking fascination and curiosity in the audience as the narrator invites the audience to imagine an idyllic society free from guilt or sorrow. Omela is “a shimmering city in the sunlight” and “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire” are lush, idealistic, and almost hypnotic. The tone is celebratory with an air of whimsy, making Omelas seem to readers as this desirable utopia and paradise.
However, as the narration delves deeper, the tone subtly shifts. What once felt celebratory slowly becomes eerily self-aware, and the reader begins to sense that this perfection is too good to be true. Le Guin’s use of second-person point of view in her language and speculative phrasing blurs the line between fiction and participation, which pulls readers into complicity before confronting them with the unsettling truth plaguing this city. This gradual zooming-in reflects the psychological journey where one takes account of the cost of collective happiness, making Le Guin’s narration as morally disturbing as the story itself.
This short story is actually the opening story in the collection. The stories jump from utopian to dystopian through justifying the means of people who do evil in order for them to be able to live happily while others are marginalized, sacrificed and deceived trying to put a roof over their heads. Utopian and dystopian literature have been highly present in so many literary works. The works that are analyzed in this study highly depict our reality as human beings and communities living in one world. Some of them happen to be lucky while others are simply unlucky and unable to demand the bare minimum rights. Therefore, the research problem that underlies this study is the portrayal of happiness and suffering in both short stories, as well as the factors that lead a utopia to become a dystopia. In other words, this study shall attempt to argue that all utopias are actually dystopias. Therefore, the main question to be investigated is as follows: ‘Is scapegoating the only possible solution for a society to find and secure its happiness?’
According to Fresco’s description of a perfect city, he proposed The Venus Project. He says, “The materials on the store present many different aspects of a possible future for humanity - values, technology and automation, human relations, how to avoid depression, relevant education, city planning, and much more. Learning about these new ideas can help you describe them to others more easily. “If you think we can't change the world, it just means you're not one of those who will” (Fresco). What Fresco means is that they are working towards a futuristic utopian city. Fresco believed that many of today’s global problems such as poverty, war, and inequality stem from outdated systems like money, politics, and profit-driven economies. To address these issues, he proposed an alternative model known as a Resource-Based Economy. In this system, instead of using money, all human needs such as food, shelter, healthcare, and education are met through the intelligent and equitable use of the Earth's resources. Advanced technology would play a central role in managing these resources efficiently, ensuring that everyone benefits. One of the most striking aspects of the Venus Project is its architectural design. Cities are envisioned in circular patterns, promoting both efficiency and aesthetic harmony. At the center lies a hub that houses essential services like healthcare, education, and decision-making technologies. Surrounding this core are green zones filled with parks, gardens, and renewable energy systems. Additionally, all utilities—such as water and electricity—are placed underground to minimize clutter and risk, creating a clean and organized living environment. https://www.thevenusproject.com/
Omelas as a Philosophical Thought Experiment
Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas functions as a speculative ethical test, inviting readers to evaluate the moral tenets of utilitarianism within the context of an idyllic yet morally compromised society. Utilitarianism, as articulated by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, holds that actions are morally right if they promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Le Guin adopts and distorts this framework, presenting Omelas as a utopia whose beauty, prosperity, and peace are made possible only through the abject suffering of a single child. This premise, stark and shocking, is not hidden from the citizens. Rather, it is institutionalized, ritualized, and rationalized—a deliberate provocation to the reader’s ethical sensibilities.
Le Guin introduces Omelas with lyrical imagery—“a city in a fairytale, long ago and far away, once upon a time” where “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air.” The joy of the city is unblemished, its people deeply intelligent and free from guilt or suspicion. However, this utopia fractures when the story reveals its cost: a child, no older than ten, is kept in darkness and filth, malnourished and terrified, locked away in a basement. “It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of cornmeal and grease a day.” The citizens know the child is there. In fact, many of them visit it in person “they all know it is there, all the people of Omelas” and though they are initially horrified, they come to accept this atrocity as necessary. “Their tears at the child’s plight are perhaps the last they will ever shed,” Le Guin writes. “They understand that they, like the child, are not free.”
This understanding marks the central tension of the story: a confrontation between moral reasoning and emotional empathy. Within the utilitarian calculus, the suffering of one child is outweighed by the happiness of thousands. Yet, Le Guin unsettles this logic by exposing its emotional violence. The ethical compromise is not abstract—it is embodied, visceral, and intolerably intimate. The child is not a number in a moral equation but a living being, stripped of all dignity. Le Guin does not name the child, does not allow for identity or history. In doing so, she underscores how utilitarianism often erases the individual in favor of the collective. The child’s suffering becomes a symbol of the silenced and sacrificial “other” in any society built on inequality.
Importantly, Le Guin situates this scenario as a thought experiment, not merely for the characters but for the reader. Omelas becomes a mirror for real-world systems of exploitation and structural injustice. The nameless child evokes the invisible laborers, racialized bodies, displaced people, or incarcerated populations upon whom modern comfort and privilege are often built. The narrative echoes a central critique of liberal democracies and capitalist societies: that happiness is unevenly distributed and often predicated on the systemic marginalization of the vulnerable. As Le Guin writes, “to exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement” in the child’s condition would mean the collapse of the entire social order. This chilling statement implies that the foundations of Omelas are not benevolence or justice, but complicity and suppression.
In this way, Omelas challenges the reader to grapple with their own thresholds of moral tolerance. Le Guin’s decision to withhold concrete details about the society—“we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy,” she notes—compels us to fill in the blanks with our own visions of paradise and the values we think underwrite it. The story thus becomes a philosophical crucible: are we content to live in Omelas, or must we confront the cost of our comfort?
By aligning her narrative with the tradition of the philosophical thought experiment—akin to the trolley problem, but far more psychologically intimate—Le Guin reveals the seductive danger of utilitarian reasoning when stripped of empathy, dignity, and justice. Omelas is not simply an imagined world; it is a critique of our own.
The Child: Symbolism and Sacrifice
At the heart of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas lies the image of the suffering child—a figure that is both literal and profoundly symbolic. The child, imprisoned in filth and darkness, functions as the narrative's ethical core and symbolic scapegoat. Its presence not only reveals the hidden violence beneath Omelas's shining utopia but also embodies the costs that are often concealed in systems of collective well-being. Le Guin deliberately invokes a sacrificial logic that forces readers to reckon with the moral foundations of any society that permits the suffering of the vulnerable for the comfort of the many.
The child is described in stark, unsettling terms: “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it; others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there.” The phrase “it has to be there” underlines how deeply this cruelty has been naturalized within the moral structure of the society. The child’s torment is not accidental; it is institutional. Its misery is the condition upon which all joy in Omelas is premised. The language here strips the child of personhood. It is no longer a “he” or “she” but an “it,” a reduction that reflects how systems of oppression depersonalize those they exploit.
Symbolically, the child represents the marginalized or oppressed groups that bear the hidden burdens of social order, those rendered invisible or disposable to maintain comfort for others. In theological terms, the child functions as a scapegoat, recalling the ancient ritual described in Leviticus, in which the sins of a community are transferred onto a single innocent being, who is then cast out. Literary theorist René Girard argues that scapegoating is foundational to societal cohesion: the violence visited upon one serves to preserve peace for the many. Le Guin invokes this archetype to criticize not just the logic of sacrifice but the way such logic becomes normalized, even sanctified, in the name of stability.
Moreover, the child also symbolizes the profound ethical dissonance that modern societies often suppress. It evokes the exploited laborer, the abused child, the political prisoner, those whose suffering is rendered “necessary” by economic, political, or cultural systems. Le Guin intensifies this critique by emphasizing the townspeople’s conscious awareness: “They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute player, could make no joyful music.” The binary is absolute. The joy of one depends entirely on the despair of another. It is a chilling vision of how happiness, when systematized and institutionalized, can become complicit in cruelty.
Yet the child is also a mirror. It reflects the unacknowledged costs of the reader’s own comfort. Le Guin refuses to allow the reader to remain morally neutral. She does not provide a neat resolution but insists we look at the child, feel its filth, hear its cries and ask ourselves what we are willing to tolerate for our own well-being. The power of the story lies in this confrontation: not with a villain, but with the reader’s own complicity.
Thus, the child is not just a character, it is a symbol of ethical sacrifice, institutionalized injustice, and suppressed guilt. It speaks to the moral failures that societies are built upon and the silenced suffering that progress too often demands. In centering this figure, Le Guin offers not merely critique, but an invitation to reckon with the invisible lives that uphold our own visions of order and happiness.
When we reflect on The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, while Omelas presents a fictional utopia sustained by the suffering of one child, Never Let Me Go similarly explores a dystopian world in which a class of human clones is bred and raised solely for the purpose of organ donation. In both stories, the suffering of a few is not an anomaly but a necessity ritualized, institutionalized, and rationalized by a society determined to protect its own comfort. The ethical cost is masked behind progress, civility, and the language of necessity, prompting readers to question the moral foundations of the worlds we construct.
In Never Let Me Go, the narrator Kathy H. gradually reveals the dark truth behind her serene upbringing at Hailsham, a boarding school for clone children. These children are not viewed as fully human by the broader society; they are valued only for their biological function—to donate their organs until they “complete,” a euphemism for death. Like the child in Omelas, these donors are stripped of agency and identity, yet their suffering is known and quietly accepted. As Miss Emily, one of the guardians, justifies: “We’re all afraid of you. We all know it. The problem is that you’re too much like us.” The discomfort stems not from ignorance, but from recognition their humanity is undeniable, and yet society chooses to suppress that truth for its own benefit.
Similarly, in Le Guin’s Omelas, the child is seen, pitied, even wept over but ultimately left in place. “They know that it is there... They know that it has to be there.” The moral logic is identical: the suffering of the one must be maintained so that the many may thrive. What is perhaps even more chilling in Never Let Me Go is the total absence of overt cruelty. The world Ishiguro constructs is quiet, polite, and deeply resigned. The clones themselves rarely resist; they internalize the belief that their lives have meaning only through sacrifice. Kathy reflects, “It never occurred to me to ask... why we couldn’t choose,” highlighting how socialization and soft power can manufacture consent in even the most oppressive systems.
Both Le Guin and Ishiguro emphasize the emotional distance societies construct to cope with their complicity. In Never Let Me Go, the general public remains willfully ignorant of the full humanity of the clones. As Miss Emily says, “We didn’t want to hear it... we couldn’t let it in.” In Omelas, this distance is maintained through the ritual of seeing the child only once, early in life, and then choosing either forgetfulness or departure. “They know that if the child were brought up into the sunlight... that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.”
Where Omelas leaves us with the haunting image of those who silently walk away from the city, Never Let Me Go offers no clear resistance. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth do not escape; they do not revolt. Their dignity lies in their emotional interiority in their love, memory, and longing but their fate remains sealed. This absence of escape presents a darker vision than Le Guin’s. Ishiguro suggests that societies can so thoroughly dominate narratives and shape expectations that injustice becomes not just tolerated, but normalized to the point of invisibility. It is not that the clones are unaware of their fate, but that they have been conditioned to believe that they have no alternative.
Both stories, though written decades apart, expose how ethical violence becomes palatable when wrapped in tradition, euphemism, or utilitarian logic. They interrogate what societies are willing to ignore, justify, or forget in pursuit of harmony or progress. And in doing so, they hold up a mirror to the reader not only to ask, Would you walk away? but more unsettlingly, Have you already stayed too long?
Complicity and Ethical Awareness
A central ethical tension in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas lies not merely in the existence of suffering, but in the conscious complicity of those who benefit from it. Le Guin forces the reader to confront a society in which happiness is contingent on injustice where the citizens know that a child is suffering and choose to accept it. This awareness transforms Omelas from a mere speculative city into a moral allegory about real-world ethical compromise. The story asks: What do we allow to happen in our name? And how much injustice are we willing to ignore to preserve our comfort?
The people of Omelas are not ignorant or malicious; rather, their awareness is what makes the story so ethically unsettling. As Le Guin writes, “They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there.” This line illustrates a society where ethical knowledge does not necessarily lead to ethical action. Instead, it breeds resignation, rationalization, or, at best, quiet sorrow. After seeing the child, “some go home in tears, or in a tearless rage... but as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom.” Here, Le Guin depicts the internal psychological mechanism of moral disengagement, justifying injustice by imagining its resolution as futile or even harmful.
This condition is not far removed from how modern societies cope with systemic exploitation. Individuals may be aware of the sweatshops that make their clothes, the migrant labor that powers their agriculture, or the prison industrial complex that upholds their institutions. Yet, like the citizens of Omelas, they rationalize this awareness into inertia. The discomfort is acknowledged, perhaps momentarily mourned, but ultimately absorbed into the status quo. Le Guin critiques this inertia with precision: “To throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of happiness of one: that would be to let guilt destroy Omelas.”
Complicity, then, is not simply about direct participation it is about ethical passivity. The citizens of Omelas are bound not by chains, but by a social contract that values stability over justice. They live with the child’s suffering, and by continuing to benefit from the system, they become agents of it. This subtle dynamic reflects broader themes in political philosophy: the relationship between citizens and state violence, between privilege and silence. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil” echoes here—where systemic wrongdoing is perpetuated not by monsters, but by ordinary people who fail to act.
Le Guin further complicates the notion of awareness by introducing the figure of those who walk away. These individuals, upon confronting the truth, choose to reject the social contract. “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.” But even this act is ambiguous. Do they represent moral courage, or merely a refusal to live with guilt? They do not free the child. They do not stay and resist. Their walking away is solitary, silent, and without confrontation. The story ends without glorifying them, leaving readers to ponder: Is refusal enough? Or does ethical awareness demand more than exit?
In this way, Le Guin reframes complicity not as an individual flaw, but as a structural and cultural condition. It is not simply a question of knowing what is wrong, but what one does with that knowledge. The story does not offer clear heroes or villains; instead, it insists that awareness without action is itself a form of moral participation. By doing so, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas compels readers to examine not only what we believe, but what we are willing to accept and at what cost.
Walking Away: Resistance or Abdication?
In the final, haunting passage of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Le Guin introduces a moral rupture: not all citizens are able to reconcile their happiness with the suffering of the child. A few, after seeing the child and absorbing the implications of their society’s structure, choose to leave. “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back.” This enigmatic act of departure has generated wide critical debate: is walking away a form of ethical resistance or is it a silent abdication of responsibility?
On one hand, these individuals might be seen as the only ones to exercise moral agency. While others remain, accepting the ethical bargain of Omelas, those who walk away refuse to benefit from a system they know to be unjust. Their decision is made in solitude, without spectacle or reformist ambition. Le Guin writes, “They seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” This line suggests a form of inner conviction, perhaps even a visionary hope. By walking away, they withdraw their consent, disrupting the complicity that upholds the city’s moral order.
Yet, this gesture is also deeply ambiguous. The story offers no detail on what lies beyond Omelas. The darkness into which they walk may symbolize the unknown, but it might also reflect the absence of a clear alternative. Unlike revolutionaries who stay to confront injustice, the ones who leave do not attempt to rescue the child, nor do they challenge the system publicly. They do not dismantle Omelas, they simply remove themselves from it. Their silence raises troubling questions: does moral purity lie in escape, or does it demand engagement?
Viewed through a political lens, walking away could be interpreted as a form of moral individualism, a retreat from the complexities of collective struggle. Philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that ethical action must sometimes involve “bearing witness to injustice and accepting the emotional burden of that knowledge.” By leaving, the walkers avoid the psychological cost of complicity but also the material cost of resistance. They neither join the suffering child nor confront those who perpetuate its condition. In this sense, their departure may represent the limits of individual dissent in the face of systemic violence.
This dilemma mirrors contemporary realities; many who become disillusioned with injustice, economic inequality, racial violence, and ecological devastation choose to “walk away” metaphorically, by disengaging from political systems, withdrawing from communities, or seeking isolated forms of ethical living. While this may preserve personal integrity, it does little to change the structures that cause harm. Le Guin’s story forces us to ask whether exit is enough, whether silence and solitude can ever constitute justice.
However, the story also leaves space for imaginative resistance. The fact that the walkers exist at all opens the possibility of alternative moral futures. Their quiet refusal might be the seed of something different not within the story, but within the reader. Le Guin’s speculative fiction functions not by offering solutions, but by creating ethical pressure. The ones who walk away unsettle us precisely because they reject what most have accepted. They do not offer a new utopia but they challenge us to imagine one.
In the end, the ambiguity of walking away is what gives it power. It resists easy interpretation. It refuses the binaries of heroism or cowardice, action or passivity. Instead, it becomes a question turned back on the reader: If you were in Omelas, what would you do? More pressingly, Are you already there?
While The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and Never Let Me Go present speculative dystopias where the happiness of the many is secured through the suffering of a marginalized few, these fictional worlds resonate deeply with the lived realities of women in patriarchal societies. In both stories, the sacrifices demanded are ritualized, normalized, and rendered invisible—an unsettling mirror to how patriarchy has historically operated to sustain itself. Women’s autonomy, labor, and dignity have long been treated as expendable resources, necessary for maintaining the stability, comfort, and traditions of male-dominated societies.
The parallels are striking: like the child in Omelas, whose suffering is essential for the city’s prosperity, and the clones in Ishiguro’s novel, whose lives are predetermined for the benefit of others, women’s sacrifices are often framed as natural or inevitable. Societies idealize female endurance, glorifying roles such as the selfless mother, the obedient daughter, or the forgiving wife, while systematically denying women the power to define their own destinies. The notion of "choice" becomes hollow when social, economic, and cultural structures constrain what is possible. In this way, consent is manufactured, not freely given, just as the clones in Never Let Me Go are socialized into accepting their fate without overt rebellion.
Moreover, the concept of complicity explored by Le Guin and Ishiguro finds a powerful echo in patriarchal systems. Patriarchy does not survive through violence alone; it persists because it cultivates resignation and rationalization. Women themselves are sometimes enlisted as enforcers of the system, encouraging compliance in younger generations as a means of survival or belonging. Similarly, men may recognize injustices yet excuse or minimize them to avoid discomfort or loss of privilege. As in Omelas, where citizens mourn the suffering of the child but choose to remain, many individuals acknowledge the inequalities faced by women but retreat into rationalizations that prioritize personal or societal stability over justice.
The dystopian conditions depicted by Le Guin and Ishiguro thus become more than metaphors—they are sharp critiques of everyday realities. Women’s marginalization, underappreciated labor, restricted bodily autonomy, and systemic silencing represent the hidden costs of the world's functioning. Like the child kept in darkness or the clones groomed for sacrifice, women have historically been the unseen foundation upon which social “harmony” was built. These narratives force readers to confront uncomfortable questions: whose suffering enables comfort, and what forms of systemic violence are tolerated, normalized, and even celebrated in the name of tradition?
In this broader lens, the dystopias of Omelas and Never Let Me Go are not distant, speculative worlds, they are haunting reflections of patriarchal reality, compelling readers to recognize the urgent need for ethical and structural transformation.
Conclusion
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is more than a parable of utopia. it is a searing moral interrogation of the ethical compromises that underpin social order. Through the image of a city whose joy depends on the misery of a single child, Le Guin challenges readers to confront the logic of utilitarianism and the emotional mechanisms of complicity. The child, stripped of personhood, becomes the symbolic vessel for all those silenced or sacrificed in the name of collective good—whether in fiction or in the real-world hierarchies of labor, race, class, gender, and power.
Le Guin does not allow her audience to rest in comfort or condemnation. Instead, she constructs a narrative that forces us to question not only the choices of Omelas’s citizens but our own participation in unjust systems. The story’s ambiguity is particularly embodied in the figure of those who walk away, functions as both provocation and possibility. Do we accept the cost of our privilege? Do we retreat in silent refusal? Or do we imagine a world not built on suffering at all?
By placing Omelas in conversation with works like Never Let Me Go, we see that Le Guin’s critique resonates across genres and generations. In each, systemic injustice is cloaked in normalcy, and the ethical challenge lies in whether we can bear to see—and respond to—the suffering beneath the surface. This same dynamic is vividly reflected in the real-world experiences of women under patriarchal systems, where sacrifice, coerced consent, and societal complicity sustain inequity across generations. Like the child in Omelas and the clones in Ishiguro’s world, women have historically been positioned as necessary yet invisible foundations of societal comfort, their suffering normalized and rationalized to preserve order.
Ultimately, Le Guin leaves us not with answers, but with questions that echo far beyond the fictional cities she imagines: What do we owe to those who suffer for our comfort? What injustices have we accepted as inevitable? And what kind of world are we willing to imagine—and build—in their place?
Works Cited
Fresco, Jacque. The Venus Project: Beyond Politics, Poverty & War. The Venus Project, https://www.thevenusproject.com/.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Vintage, 2006.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. The Wind's Twelve Quarters: Short Stories. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2004, pp. 1–7.
Tessman, Lisa. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. Oxford University Press, 2005.
This page has paths:
- Otherness and Ethical Dilemma in Utopian society Bukola Abiodun Ossai
- Otherness and Ethical Dilemmas Adelmar Ramirez
