It is impossible for a society to be perfect. 

The narrator presents Omelas throughout most of the story as a utopia, a perfect city in which all its citizens are happy and sated. Le Guin uses the opening paragraph of the story to describe the perfection of Omelas down to the last detail—including the Festival of Summer, the dancing, the clear morning air, the “great joyous clanging of the bells”—in order to establish what exactly is at stake. It is pivotal for Omelas to be seen as flawless, no matter how artificial it may seem to the reader, in order for the child’s reveal later on to make maximal impact. However, as the story progresses, the narrator’s struggle to further describe Omelas’s perfection highlights its preposterous existence. The narrator’s need to assure their audience that there’s plenty of room for hedonism in this society reveals their understanding that this utopia is being made up, and cannot really exist. For instance, the narrator mentions that one could add the basest of human pleasures, including but not limited to drugs. But the narrator immediately catches themselves, noting that the drugs in question will be harmless. In fact, they’re entirely optional and unnecessary. Thus, the narrator here makes a contradiction almost mid-thought in order to uphold the perceived perfection of Omelas. Additionally, the idea of celebrating the fictional city’s soldiers but never actually needing them for war or defense is likewise preposterous. This contradiction highlights the absurdity of a utopia like Omelas; the constant editorializing, and the on-the-fly changes made to Omelas’s promises and operations, stretch the imagination to its limits, suggesting that a place like Omelas doesn’t, and can’t actually, exist.

If one can’t imagine a utopia, there must be something wrong with society.

The story places the fictional city of Omelas in stark contrast against the real societies of the world. Every single description of this utopia, from the mundane to the far-fetched to the truly sinister, reveals the nature of real human society. Le Guin uses the narrator’s tone and point of view to highlight the struggle inherent in convincing an audience that such a utopia is real, or at least believable. If Omelas is described as too perfect, the audience might struggle to believe in it. Instead, the narrator simply asks them to accept “the festival, the city, the joy.” They may not be able to believe such a place is possible, but they can accept the conditions of the city as a hypothetical. By presenting this option, the narrator seems to suggest that the audience is incapable of believing in a fully perfect society, and that such an inability reflects poorly on reality. That is, if the audience can’t believe in Omelas, it’s because they live in an imperfect world themselves, and so their imaginations can’t conceive of what they have never experienced. After finally describing the child and asking the audience if they believe in Omelas now, the narrator hints that the city’s terrible secret is what makes it realistic. With the reveal of the child, Omelas becomes something close to believable—but at the same time, it ceases to be the wholly perfect society originally presented at the start of the story.

People will find ways to justify their own inaction in the face of suffering. 

Le Guin uses her narrator’s justification of the child’s treatment to point out that societies often attempt to justify the state of the world even if it is at the expense of others. While the child is an extreme example, it is this extremity that brings the idea to the fore in the story. In revealing the child, Le Guin’s narrator describes the terms by which the child is kept suffering. To intervene or help the child, Omelas would need to be destroyed. Whether this is a physical destruction of the city itself or merely the loss of such utopian happiness is never revealed, but the manner in which Omelas would be destroyed does not actually matter. What matters is that the citizens are not willing to sacrifice their utopia in order to right this clearly egregious wrong.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator describes the ways in which the citizens of Omelas justify their inaction: even if they were to try and help, the child “would not get much good out of its freedom,” “it is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy,” “after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it.” In speculating that the child has been abused for too long to actually perceive or respond to humane treatment, the citizens rationalize that their compliance with the child’s mistreatment actually makes them better and more humane people. The narrator says that these connections between the child’s suffering and the people’s happiness can be understood, but they also offer no specific details about this contract. For example, there is no information about the formalities of the arrangement, how came to be, or why it exists. It is simply a matter of truth that is never questioned or challenged, and by going along with it, the people of Omelas are just as guilty as the child’s actual keepers. In a way, they are the child’s keepers.