<P> The quote from William James is: </P> <P> Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far - off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? </P> <P> Introducing the short work in her 2012 collection The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two, Le Guin noted that The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality ." </P> <P> It has been at times analyzed as a postmodernist work . </P>

Themes for the ones who walk away from omelas