By reviewing The Bet by Anton Chekhov and Consensus of Death by Kenny Brydon, I was able to delve into what it’s like to live behind bars from the perspective of the incarcerated.
With Chekhov, it’s a philosophical juggling act, while Brydon faced the stark reality of experience.
Ursula Le Guin gives me the chance to reflect on corrections policy and ethics in The Ones Who Walk Away From the Omelas.
I received Le Guin’s short story from a friend who used to come inside this place and teach me how to write. She’s never abandoned her inspiring and awesome support in what my pen produces.
Lizzie Buchen, who has just begun a new job with Californians United for a Responsible Budget as Statewide Advocacy and Communications Co-coordinator sends me reading material all the time so that I better understand the psychological and social impact of incarceration.
After taking in this story, I weighed upon what Fyodor Dostoevsky says: “Man is a being that can get used to anything, but don’t ask us how.”
Le Guin confronts Dostoevsky by asking “How?” in her fascinating and beautifully crafted narrative The Ones Who Walk Away From the Omelas.
The story contains picturesque and descriptive language of a place where I’d love to live—a place of swallows soaring—where you can see the rigging of the boats and the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls. Yeah, this is an enchanting sight in my mind’s eye.
Everything about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas gives me a deep-rooted feeling of comfort.
“I loved Le Guin’s juxtaposition of images and ideas,” Emile DeWeaver of SQ Reviews said. “She contrasts ‘grave master workmen’ with ‘quiet, merry women,’ and mountain snow burns with ‘white-gold fire.’”
“When she describes Omelas, a utopia, she writes, ‘They are not barbarians,’” De Weaver said. “I couldn’t help but think back on this as a stark contrast to the reality I later discover,” he added, “Le Guin’s use of juxtaposition of opposites does that irrational thing that good art accomplishes. It conveys the weight of our unknown universe whose meaning hovers near our reaching minds.”
As an incarcerated individual, accepting Omelas, where life is perfect, it was the community’s willingness to do the unthinkable to maintain its status quo that threw me.
While I enjoyed Le Guin’s utopian theme, coming to grips with the meaning of the title made me wonder.
Then it hit me like a ton of bricks—the truth—just like in Snow Falling on Cedars, 1995 (David Guterson). There’s a place in Omelas where there’s “no window anywhere in his basement cell, no portal through which the autumn light could come to him.”
In this truth, I question what extent societies will undergo in order to maintain a nicely pictured life. Moreover, what we, as Americans, are willing to tolerate in order to maintain “Law and Order.”
Le Guin challenges readers’ morality by presenting an argument: the most good for the most people in the community is a price that could be sufficiently paid by the suffering of one.
This is a moral question for each citizen of Omelas—individually.
“Often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself,” Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning remarked.
And so did the ones who walked away from Omelas.
Write to San Quentin News if you’re incarcerated and want a copy of the story.
Juan’s Book Review