Page "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" Paragraph 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 fact is, I haven't been able to re-read Dostoyevsky, much as I loved him, since I was twenty-five, and I'd simply forgotten he used the idea.

But when I met it in James ' ' The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life ,' it was with a shock of recognition.