With deliberately both vague and vivid descriptions, the narrator depicts a summer festival in the utopian city of Omelas, whose prosperity depends on the perpetual misery of a single child.

The vibrant festival atmosphere, however, seems to be an everyday characteristic of the blissful community, whose citizens, though limited in their technology and resources, are still intelligent, sophisticated, and cultured.

"[6] "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 quote from William James is: Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

[6][7]As for the original Dostoyevsky quote, Charlie Jane Anders of Gizmodo notes:[8] In Karamazov, Dovstoevsky poses the problem of the Tortured Child: "Tell me yourself — I challenge you: let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility.

If you knew that, in order to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?

Le Guin's piece was originally published in New Dimensions 3, a hardcover science fiction anthology edited by Robert Silverberg, in October 1973.

[11] Le Guin noted in that collection that "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" "has a long and happy career of being used by teachers to upset students and make them argue fiercely about morality.

Designers Ricardo Bare and Harvey Smith of the Dishonored video game series drew on the story as inspiration for the supernatural being The Outsider, an omnipotent immortal reviled as an avatar of evil.

"[13] The 2017 music video for "Spring Day" by South Korean band BTS references Le Guin's short story, both thematically and in displaying a hotel named 'Omelas'.

[21] Several reviewers also noted a strong similarity between the story and the episode "Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach" of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds first season.