How Does Omelas Show Guilt

The Ones Who Walk Away Form Guilt
You don’t feel guilt or anger for the suffering and troubles of complete strangers, but you do feel guilt and anger for the suffering of your family, friends, and your own self. You only care about the people close to you. This is the same in the almost perfect city of Omelas. The ones who stay don’t feel guilt over anything. Those in Omelas who stay are unjust for they feel no guilt over the wrongs they commit to the child for their personal gain. To remove the guilt they fell from themselves they dehumanize the child. They change it into an object or a beast, which plagues their city or a stain upon their otherwise perfect city. The ones who stayed dehumanize the child so they feel no guilt for what they
do to the child. They call the child “it” (16-17) as to distance themselves from it, to make it an item not a person. Even if they didn’t know the name of the child they wouldn’t just call the child, “it” (16-17), they would call child the child. All the people of Omelas know the child. It is “usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve”(17) about the child. Telling the children about the child at such a younger age causes the child to become more of a legend or story then a real person. This is the only reason why the people of Omelas would tell children about something so disturbing at such a young age. Because something like this could scare any one who heard about it or saw it. The child is kept in living conditions that dehumanize it. They force it to stay in “a mere broom closet” (17). Since there is no room in the “broom closet”(17) the child is forced to sit “it sits in its own excrement continually”(17). These conditions are not

Page 2 even suitable for animals, which causes the child to be lower then an animal, nothing more than an object.
When the people dehumanize the child to starts to become nothing more than an object or a beast that they have to live with.
He is treated like an animal because his living conditions are similar to a zoo. People come and see him when they want “a person or, several people, are there”(17). The child is show off like a caged animal. Since they show him off as a caged animal they keep him in some thing simulate to a cage. He lives in a small room about “three paces long and two wide”(17), which is about the same length of a caged for an animal. Some animal cages are bigger and will fit the animal but when the animal is being inhumanly treated he get about the same amount of room that the child is force to live in. Finally even the people who come to watch or see the child find the conditions disgusting, like the child is a savage animal who cant live in a decent environment. The look on with “frightened, disgusted eyes”(17) at the child and the conditions that he is forced to live in. Though they could be looking at how the child is being treated with the “disgusted eyes”(17), they are more disgusted by how the child is disfigured and how it is sitting in its own
excrement.
They look not just the condition the child lives in but they also look at the child with disgust. They think that the child is the plague upon the city, the thing that gives flaw to there other wise perfect city. The child is nothing more to the city then a scapegoat. The child is used to put the blame on for the cities problems. When Le Guin wrote the story she was thinking of a scapegoat when she wrote about the child ”The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat”(19) When the people leave after seeing the child they leave “in a tearless rage, when

Page 3 they have seen the child”(17).
They leave in that rage not because of how the child is being treated but how this problem has to be with there city, how they have to deal with it. Also “they fell disgust”(17) towards the child for it staining there city. Sure they could feel anger and disgust towards the treatment and the conditions towards the child, but then why wouldn’t they try to help the child. Why couldn’t they find another way? Also if they truly felt bad about what happened to the boy and how he was treated, they wouldn’t just cope with the problem then push it to the back of their memories. If they feel guilty about the child then why would they put the child under ground? Why would they put it somewhere where not much natural light could get to it? They put the child under the ground so that they didn’t have to see it so they could hide it and then live their lives with out thinking about the
child. The people of Omelas are not morally just on their treatment of the child. They dehumanize the child so that they can cope with what they are doing to the child. To cope they call the child “it”(17), force the child to live in conditions not even expectable for animals, and change the child into more of a legend then a person to relieve themselves of there guilt. To control guilt of the child they dehumanize the child to the point where to them it is more a beast or object then a person. They achieve this by keeping the child in a cage, showing off the child in the cage like nothing more then a disgusting beast, and find the child and its conditions disgusting. Since this people think of the child as nothing more then an object he becomes this object that plague their city. The child is nothing more that the only stain on this perfect civilization. With this the child becomes the scapegoat for the people and th