<P> Everything about Omelas is so abundantly pleasing that the narrator decides the reader is not yet truly convinced of its existence and so elaborates upon one final element of the city: its one atrocity . The city's constant state of serenity and splendor requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness, and misery . </P> <P> Once citizens are old enough to know the truth, most, though initially shocked and disgusted, ultimately acquiesce with that one injustice which secures the happiness of the rest of the city . However, a few citizens, young and old, silently walk away from the city, and no one knows where they go . The writing ends with "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness . I cannot describe it at all . It is possible it does not exist . But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas ." </P> <P> Le Guin stated that the city's name is pronounced "OH - meh - lahss". Le Guin hit upon the name of the town on seeing a road sign for Salem, Oregon, in a car mirror . "(... People ask me)' Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally . Where else?" </P> <P> "The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat", writes Le Guin, "turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James . The fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty - five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea . But when I met it in James' ' The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,' it was with a shock of recognition ." </P>

Who is the narrator of the ones who walk away from omelas