The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which genre label best fits “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”?

   • Traditional science fiction (a plot driven by advanced technology)
   • Epic fantasy (a quest across a fully invented world)
   • Correct answer: Philosophical allegory (a parable told in a speculative mode)
   • Gothic horror (built on the supernatural and creeping decay)

   Correct — the story appeared in a science fiction anthology and won the Hugo Award, yet it has no aliens, spacecraft, or future setting; it's a philosophical thought-experiment given a city and a festival.

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2. 2

   Question 2. How does the narrator describe Omelas during the opening Festival of Summer?

   • A militarized city bracing its citizens for an approaching war
   • Correct answer: A genuinely joyful city, with no kings, slavery, secret police, or guilt
   • A struggling city that hides widespread poverty and hunger behind its festival banners
   • A technologically advanced city governed entirely by machines

   The narrator takes pains to describe a mature, intelligent happiness — a city free of monarchy, slavery, and the machinery of guilt — precisely so the reader cannot dismiss it as naive before the story's turn.

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3. 3

   Question 3. What does the subtitle, “Variations on a Theme by William James,” refer to?

   • A poem James wrote celebrating utopian cities and the quiet contentment of their citizens
   • A psychology experiment James ran on public sacrifice rituals
   • A private letter James wrote proposing the plot to Le Guin's father
   • Correct answer: James's essay describing a happiness purchased by one distant person's suffering

   In 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' William James asked how it would feel to accept a happiness that depended on one lost soul's lonely torture — the 'theme' Le Guin built into a city.

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4. 4

   Question 4. What distinctive narrative technique runs through the story?

   • A first-person narrator who is gradually revealed, over the course of the story, to be the child locked in the cellar
   • An unreliable narrator whose entire account is exposed as false at the end
   • Correct answer: A discursive narrator who builds Omelas with the reader, using conditional phrases like 'perhaps' and 'I think'
   • A rotating chorus of narrators, each one a different named citizen of Omelas

   The narrator is an essayist, not a character, who openly negotiates the city's details with the reader — 'perhaps,' 'I think' — until the one fact that cannot be softened, the child, arrives without qualification.

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5. 5

   Question 5. What does "Utilitarian" mean in this story?

   • Judging an action right only if it follows a strict religious code
   • Correct answer: Judging an action right if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number
   • Judging an action right if it protects individual liberty above every other value
   • Judging an action right if it can be carried out efficiently and cheaply

   Utilitarian ethics judges an act by its total consequences for the greatest number — exactly the calculation Omelas makes when it trades one child's misery for a whole city's happiness.

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6. 6

   Question 6. Which detail about the child in the cellar is true, according to the story?

   • Correct answer: It was not always in the cellar — it still remembers sunlight and its mother's voice
   • It was born in the cellar and has never once seen sunlight or heard the sound of a human voice
   • It is guarded by soldiers who keep every citizen from viewing it
   • It was placed there as punishment for something it did as a small child

   The story specifies that the child remembers sunlight and its mother's voice, meaning it was not born into the cellar — a detail that makes its condition even more horrifying, since it once knew something better.

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7. 7

   Question 7. The narrator calls the terms “strict and absolute.” Beyond never releasing the child, what does the story name as forbidden?

   • Removing the child from the cellar for a single day
   • Telling a child younger than eight about the cellar's existence
   • Letting the child glimpse the Festival of Summer procession
   • Correct answer: Speaking one kind word to the child in the cellar

   The terms are strict and absolute: "there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child." What the story says would destroy the city's beauty, health, wisdom and abundance is bringing the child "up into the sunlight" and cleaning, feeding and comforting it — so no partial mercy is allowed either.

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8. 8

   Question 8. Between what ages do citizens of Omelas learn about the child in the cellar?

   • Between four and six years old
   • Not until they turn eighteen years old
   • Correct answer: Between eight and twelve years old
   • Between thirteen and fifteen years old

   It is "usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding" — old enough to grasp the bargain, young enough that it shapes the rest of their lives; the narrator hedges it as a custom, not an absolute rule.

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9. 9

   Question 9. According to the story, why do most citizens of Omelas eventually stay after learning about the child?

   • They are informed that a strict citywide law forbids anyone from ever discussing the child again
   • Correct answer: They come to feel there is no way to help the child that wouldn't destroy everything else
   • They genuinely believe, after some years, that the child feels no pain at all
   • They are promised that the child will eventually be freed once it grows older

   Most citizens go home in tears and rage at first, but over weeks or years they reconcile themselves — convinced that no rescue is possible without unraveling the very happiness the child makes possible.

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10. 10

    Question 10. What is the central ethical dilemma the story asks readers to confront?

    • Whether a hereditary monarchy governs a city more justly than an elected representative council
    • Whether religious faith is necessary for any society to remain moral
    • Correct answer: Whether an entire society's happiness can be justified if it depends on one person's absolute suffering
    • Whether banning new technology helps a community preserve its traditions

    The story strips utilitarian logic to its starkest case: the greatest good for the greatest number, purchased at total cost to one — a dilemma taught from high school English classes through law school ethics courses.

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11. 11

    Question 11. What does the child in the cellar most broadly symbolize?

    • Correct answer: A scapegoat whose suffering underwrites a comfortable society's prosperity
    • A warning about the dangers of unregulated scientific experimentation
    • A symbol of the inevitable collapse awaiting every human civilization
    • A representation of nature's indifference toward innocent creatures

    Because the child is left unnamed and of unspecified sex, readers have applied the symbol widely — to the poor, the imprisoned, the colonized, or any group whose distant misery underwrites someone else's comfort.

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12. 12

    Question 12. Which of these events actually happened in the story?

    • The story opens during the Festival of Summer in the city of Omelas.

      Happened

      The narrator introduces Omelas through the sights and sounds of its summer festival — bells, processions, races, and joy.

    • The narrator claims total certainty about every detail of Omelas.

      Didn't happen

      The narrator openly admits to inventing the city with the reader's help, using conditional language like 'perhaps' and 'I think.'

    • No character in the story is given a proper name.

      Happened

      Le Guin deliberately leaves everyone unnamed — the citizens, the child, and even the ones who walk away.

    • The child in the cellar was born there and has never known anything else.

      Didn't happen

      The child remembers sunlight and its mother's voice, meaning it was not born in the cellar.

    • Children in Omelas are usually told about the child between the ages of eight and twelve.

      Happened

      The narrator hedges it: it is “usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding” — a custom, not an absolute rule.

    • The story explains exactly where the ones who walk away go and what they find.

      Didn't happen

      The narrator confesses the destination is even less imaginable than Omelas itself, and may not exist at all.

    • The subtitle credits the story's central idea to a variation on a theme by William James.

      Happened

      The story's subtitle is 'Variations on a Theme by William James,' referencing his essay on a similar moral bargain.

    • Citizens who walk away leave through the city gates and head toward the mountains.

      Happened

      The narrator describes them walking alone through the gates of Omelas and on, "west or north, towards the mountains".

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13. 13

    Question 13. What does the narrator say about the destination of those who walk away, in the story's final lines?

    • It is a rival city beyond the mountains that reportedly welcomes every exile who leaves Omelas
    • It is a wilderness where the walkers are explicitly said to perish
    • It is revealed to be another Omelas, built without a suffering child
    • Correct answer: It is even less imaginable than the city of happiness, and may not exist at all

    The story ends on radical uncertainty: the walkers' destination is harder to describe than Omelas itself, and might not exist — yet the narrator insists they seem to know where they are going.

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14. 14

    Question 14. Which literary device most defines the story's structure, pairing scenes of civic joy with the child's suffering in the same measured prose?

    • Flashback that alternates between the child's future and its distant past
    • Correct answer: Juxtaposition of the city's joy against the child's suffering, told in one calm, unbroken tone
    • Foreshadowing that hints at an approaching war that will destroy Omelas
    • Dramatic irony, since the citizens of Omelas are supposedly unaware of the child while only readers know the truth

    The story's single brutal cut is placing the racecourse and the cellar side by side in identical, precise prose; dramatic irony doesn't apply, since every citizen — not just the reader — knows about the child.

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15. 15

    Question 15. How does the narrator try to make the reader believe in a genuinely joyful Omelas?

    • By listing exhaustive statistics about the city's population, economy, tax rates, and government budget
    • By quoting extensive first-hand testimony from citizens about their daily routines
    • Correct answer: By inviting the reader to add festivals, technology, or a drug, until the happiness feels convincing
    • By comparing Omelas point-by-point against a real historical utopian community

    The narrator negotiates directly with the reader's skepticism, offering to add an orgy, the drug drooz, or whatever technology the reader pleases — making the reader a co-author of the city, and therefore complicit in its terms.

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16. 16

    Question 16. Le Guin acknowledged that which earlier novel poses a similar dilemma about one child's suffering purchasing collective happiness?

    • Correct answer: Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan poses the same bargain to his brother
    • Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, where a woman's public shame anchors a Puritan town
    • Kafka's The Trial, where an accused man is never told the nature of his crime
    • Orwell's 1984, where a totalitarian state controls its citizens' every thought

    Le Guin credited both William James and Dostoevsky, whose character Ivan Karamazov challenges his brother with the torture of a single child as the price of universal harmony — the same bargain Omelas makes literal.

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17. 17

    Question 17. Where did the story first appear, and what award did it win?

    • In The New Yorker magazine in 1948, where it went on to win that year's O. Henry Award for fiction
    • Correct answer: In the 1973 anthology New Dimensions 3; it won the 1974 Hugo Award for Best Short Story
    • In a magazine Le Guin edited herself in 1965; it won the National Book Award
    • In an anthology published in 1980; it won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette

    The story debuted in Robert Silverberg's original-fiction anthology New Dimensions 3 in 1973 and won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story the following year; it was later collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

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