Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.” Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Omelas is an amorphous, imaginary space and this becomes abundantly clear when the narrator invites the reader to create Omelas.Īnticipating the disbelief of the reader in the existence of such a perfect place, she writes, “I wish I could convince you. We realize early in the narrative, that the narrator does not intend to create a real city with clearly defined geographical boundaries. Everything else is by way of conjecture and speculation. The celebration of the first summer day is the only chronological event mentioned in the entire narrative. It does not have kings, soldiers, priests, slaves, and “got on without stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police and the bomb.” Beyond this statement, the political, social and economic set up of Omelas is not referred to at all and the narrator simply says she is not sure about it. We are told that Omelas does not have a figure of authority. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting…we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” Before we can attribute this happy state of being to some benevolent king or oligarchs, the narrator quickly dispels all such notions. Although the people of Omelas are as “complex” as us, and not in any way “simple”, they valued happiness whereas “we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Here the narrator launches into a passionate critique of the society we live in where happiness is considered “stupid”. The people are “intelligent, sophisticated and cultured” and also blissfully happy all the time. This we are immediately told is not specific to that particular day, but is a permanent state of being in Omelas. There is a festive atmosphere, joy and happiness all around. The narrative begins by describing the first day of summer in the city of Omelas.