However, happiness does not exist solely due to the child’s suffering the narrator also suggests other, secondary conditions for the town’s happiness.
Therefore, the story suggests not only that suffering enables joy, but also that suffering and joy are always intermingled, and that achieving happiness requires an intimate understanding of grief. The price of happiness, in other words, is suffering, and without one the other cannot exist. The fundamental condition of life in Omelas is that, in order for society to be happy, the child must suffer without reprieve. Even in her imagined city of perfect happiness, LeGuin insists that one child must suffer extreme neglect and torture so the other citizens may experience joy. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” posits that there can be no happiness without suffering.
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