I Who Have Never Known Men

“Perhaps, in stopping the story, I was disappointing an inner listener who preferred the story to the agitation, which is why she always drew it out and would happily have deprived me in order to prolong her own pleasure. Sometimes, in the course of the story, I would try and argue with her: ‘I’m tired, I want to go to sleep, let me get to the eruption, I’ll carry on tomorrow.’ But it was no use, she would not allow herself to be fooled.”

The child is exploring both her erogeneity and her creativity. Her fantasies about the young guard produce pleasurable orgasms, but she also relishes the process of storytelling. This quote features an internal debate over the relative values of thoughts and their intended results, resembling her arguments with the women about gaining information devoid of application. This scene enriches the theme of The Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge.

“Never had any of the women spoken to me for so long. I sensed that she had passed on to me everything she knew, and I experienced a mild light-headedness that was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories.”

This quote follows the narrative’s first conversation between Anthea and the child, which is representative of their lifelong relationship that follows. Unlike the other women, Anthea imparts knowledge, regardless of its immediate utility, and becomes a mentor. Indeed, at the end of her life, Anthea says she tried to teach her everything she could, and the narrator feels a unique form of love and gratitude. Moreover, in this quote, the child again puts mental stimulation on par with erotic pleasure.

“That rekindled a spirit of rebellion in their numbed minds. We had our own time, which had nothing in common with that of those who kept us locked up, we rediscovered the quality of being human. We were no longer in league with the guards. Inside the bars, my strong, regular heart fuelled by youthful anger had restored to us our own territory, we had established an area of freedom.”

The women stopped asking questions long ago, but the child’s curiosity about the guards’ shifts leads to the prisoners’ reclamation of a 24-hour day. Their independent clock frees them from the arbitrary schedule imposed by the prison’s lighting, which symbolizes the mysterious system’s power over the women. Invoking the motif of timekeeping, this quote shows time to be an interpersonal construct, an indication of humanity. It unites and empowers the prisoners. Moreover, by serving as their clock, the child enters the women’s world.

“I had no thoughts, only a profound thrill that swept me along, and images, perhaps, that raced through my mind, or simply words that gushed up inside me and rose to receive the imminent images, the sky, the night, the horizon, the sun, the wind, and many more, countless words that had accumulated over the years and which were in a hurry, spurring me forward.”

The protagonist races up the bunker staircase after escaping the cage. This quote appears in a long paragraph that spans nearly two full pages and uses few periods. Phrases are separated by commas in a stream of consciousness, indicating the narrator’s racing thoughts and emotions. Just as the character’s motivation throughout the narrative is a quest for knowledge, here the anticipation of finding images to define words propels her.

“I stood there at a loss, contemplating my situation. I discovered physical solitude, something so ordinary for everybody else but which I had never experienced. It immediately appealed to me. Luckily.”

Outside the bunker, the women construct a concealed bathroom and invite the narrator to use it. She savors her inclusion in their world but cannot understand the women’s sentimentality over private defecation. She has her own emotional reaction inside, however, when she experiences solitude for the first time. She foreshadows her decades of utter aloneness when she states that she is lucky to have enjoyed isolation. This quote illustrates the protagonist’s conflicting affinities for inclusion and independence, developing the theme of Humanity and Interconnectedness.

“I soon became the strongest, probably because I was the youngest. Anyway, I was the one who found it easiest to become acclimatized, probably because I had not known anything else and was not riddled with regrets.”

After escaping, the women walk to a concealed area to camp, and some are weak after years of limited movement in the cage. The narrator breaks from relaying these events with an aside foreshadowing her companions’ difficulty adapting to the outside world. Her comment, which contrasts naivete and regret, supports the theme of Curiosity Versus Expectations.

“Dorothy ate sitting on her chair, and we gathered round her. ‘We have to leave,’ she said. ‘We can’t settle here and live from the bunker like parasites. We must remain human beings. I want to know where we are, who imprisoned us and why. I do not want to die sitting on a chair, in the middle of I don’t know what.’”

The imagery of Dorothy seated, surrounded by the others, highlights her leadership and esteem. Harpman further characterizes Dorothy through fiery diction, such as her simile comparing the group to parasites. Dorothy uses the women’s dependence on the freezers to justify exploration, introducing the food stores as symbols of the group’s continued imprisonment and lack of humanity. At this point, Dorothy’s determination to search until death aligns the group’s plans with the narrator’s quest for knowledge.

“But this time, it was to seek a place to settle down. It was as if these two deaths had convinced us that there was nothing on this planet that was perhaps not Earth. We wanted a river not too far from a bunker that would fulfil our needs: just like the spot we were leaving, but, of course, we did not want to remain so close to the place where one of us had had to kill herself to put an end to her suffering.”

Not long after Dorothy’s peaceful death, Mary-Jane falls painfully ill and hangs herself in a bunker. Without Dorothy’s stubborn influence, disappointment saps the women’s hope. Expecting to encounter civilization, they find so few familiarities that they question if they are even on Earth. The women stop exploring and erect a village, approximating their former lives. This decision builds on the theme of Curiosity Versus Expectation.

“Because I want to know! Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I will never be able to use it. And don’t forget, I’m the youngest, one day I’ll probably be the last and I might need to know things for reasons which I cannot imagine today.”

The narrator is in her twenties, and Anthea has taught her generously. Still, when asked about sex, Anthea questions the purpose of providing answers, given the absence of men. The narrator is enraged, and her response encapsulates the theme of The Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge. The scene also further develops the character of Anthea as a mentor and mother figure. The narrator not only demands education but also references Anthea’s obligation to prepare her for her independent future.

“It is true that I know nothing of all that and that I have no memories of my own childhood. That is perhaps why I am so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences which make you fully human.”

Emboldened by Anthea’s teaching, the narrator asks other women about their former lives, but they refuse to discuss their children. To explain, Anthea describes the intensity of a parent’s love, but the narrator has no reference points. As she often does in the narrative, in this quote the protagonist questions the link between Humanity and Interconnectedness.

“‘How will you survive?’

‘I’ll move on. I’ll carry on looking. If it had been up to me, I would never have stopped, but I could see that the others couldn’t carry on anymore.’”

As Anthea is dying, her characterization as a mother figure expands. She feels she is abandoning her obligations and worries about the narrator’s future. In this quote, the narrator explains how she will live when alone. Her plans identify the central conflict in her story: A quest for knowledge motivates the protagonist, who is a loner, but she appreciates the importance of Humanity and Interconnectedness.

“Only today, I say to myself that what I had felt for her, that trust that slowly built up, that constant preference and that joy each time I was reunited with her after an expedition were probably what the women called love.”

By “today,” the elderly narrator refers to the moment in which she is writing her life story, roughly five decades after the guards’ whip stunted her emotional development. She breaks from the narrative of her recollections to confess her feelings for Anthea. Although a late-in-life revelation, the aside’s diction indicates childlike naïveté, as the narrator pieces together her memories and applies what she learned from the women, still not certain she understands love.

“True, it was not a very appetizing meal, but it was pleasantly seasoned with the feeling of having complete freedom at last. I was able to gauge just how much I had resented having to give in to the other women’s wish to settle down, and I smiled to myself as I thought of the immense journey awaiting me.”

After Laura’s death, the protagonist embarks on her solo expedition and is so exhausted on the first night that she eats her food cold. Her figurative language equating freedom to flavor reflects her giddiness over an unhindered exploration. Interconnectedness impeded her life’s quest to learn everything possible simply for the Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge. At this point in the protagonist’s character development, she is again embracing solitude.

“I was electrified by this theory, I could feel my footsteps dancing and I began to laugh. I was perfectly aware that I had only added another question to all the others, but it was new, and that, in the absurd world in which I lived, and still do live, was happiness.”

As during her childhood fantasies, the narrator sees the Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge as separate from any intended results. As she explores, she finds nothing new; everything is uniform. However, rather than disappointing her, this fact sparks a new theory that even the guards were uninformed victims of the mysterious power structure. The imagery of her dancing feet and laughter underscores the joy she finds in mental activity.

“Obviously, I did not know it was paper, because I had never seen any, but I shall not go into the difficulties I had in recognizing and naming all these things, for it would be too tedious and I would not enjoy it, I would have to repeat myself over and over again.”

When the protagonist finds the bus, she must calm herself while opening the guards’ kit bags, which are a new discovery. The narrator lists the items inside but breaks from the recollection to explain that she is omitting her process of item identification. Her reason is that it would not be enjoyable. Having no obligations means that the narrator can center her own pleasure in her activities. After leading a monotonous childhood in prison and a routine existence with the women, the narrator rejoices in her freedom to live on her own terms.

“I felt an immense sadness as I thought that there had been men, that their closeness could trigger that delicious tremor and that I was reduced, poor me! to encountering it by chance in a dream. For a few moments I wondered what gave me my determination to live, I thought of all those women who had been killed by despair […] I got up and took a few steps. It was a clear night, the sky was vast, hill after hill, I had thousands of kilometers to cover. My curiosity, momentarily dampened, was reawakened.”

One night, the narrator has a dream about being on the bus with the guards, who are alive and chatting. She experiences an orgasm as she had during her childhood fantasies. After Anthea’s anatomy lessons, the narrator explored her own body for erotic sensations but determined that her underdeveloped reproductive system was incapable of physical stimulation. Here, she recalls the women’s despair over what they were missing. The midsentence exclamation underscores her distress. However, the protagonist’s curiosity, which has always motivated her, dispels her sadness.

“The pile was artificial, there was absolutely no doubt about that. If it concealed nothing, I would have to ask myself why someone had made it and all I would have gained would be a new question, that worthless treasure that was beginning to weary me. This world was like a jigsaw puzzle, I only had a few pieces which did not fit together. Once, Anthea had explained that game to me and I thought I would have enjoyed it.”

The narrator is removing the stones that cover the underground home. After disappointments like a road that ended nowhere, she dreads another inexplicable construction. She has explored for two years since Laura’s death, and her excitement over unsolvable mysteries is waning. The oxymoron describing new questions as “worthless treasures” demonstrates her growing internal conflict with Curiosity Versus Expectations. Still, at this point, she uses a simile comparing her world to a jigsaw puzzle, which she considers enjoyable, indicating the resilience of her belief in The Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge.

“There was so much to investigate, taking it all in was so thrilling that I had not yet realized that one of the ornaments on the wall was a shelf laden with books. My head started spinning again, and I stood staring across the room at them for ages. I had read and reread my gardening handbook and knew it by heart.”

The protagonist is exploring the underground home. Her excitement over the books encapsulates the theme of The Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge. The only book she has read, the gardening manual from the bus, offered no applicable information, but she memorized it, feeling it added value to her world. Here, the image of the narrator standing before the shelf, dizzy and spellbound, accentuates her hunger to learn.

“[F]eelings remain a mystery to me. It is perhaps because the sensations associated with them are foreign to me, or because they repel me as did physical contact, which seems to be so important in love. Whenever I think of Anthea’s death and the effort it took to hold her in my arms, it brings tears to my eyes. I try to imagine myself being warm: there is always a point when the whip cracks.”

The narrator is discussing what she learned from exploring and reading in the bunker home and notes her continued ignorance of feelings. The diction demonstrates her mindset. She creates an image of two women embracing, which is jarringly interrupted by the introduction of the whip. Moreover, the use of the past tense in saying that physical contact “did” repel her highlights her utter solitude.

“It contains more provisions than I had ever seen in the prisons, you could live there forever. It seems to me that it is a luxurious place, but it is obvious that I do not have a clear idea of luxury. In the ceiling, there are the same air-conditioning grates as in the other bunkers and, when I keep absolutely quiet, I can hear the same soft hum that indicates that everything is working.”

The narrator notes the underground home may be connected to the prison system, indicated by the air conditioning hum, which she heard every day until her prison escape. Like the perpetual lighting in the prisons, the electricity in her bunker proves that the mysterious system retains its power.

“On my last trip, I was standing on top of a hill, before me stretched a long walk down and a new plain, I could see a cabin in the distance, and suddenly, I was overcome with despondency. I told myself: another staircase, the guards’ room, the cage and forty emaciated corpses. I sat down and the realization dawned on me that I had had enough. For the twenty or so years that I had been alone, hope had buoyed me up, and suddenly, it had deserted me.”

Previous descriptions of vast plains and outstretched land preceded descriptions of the narrator’s excitement to explore. The character’s motivation was always discovery. In this quote, however, she feels her curiosity stall. The scene is a major turning point in the narrative. She is on her final excursion before retiring to her bunker home, writing her story, and ending her life.

“The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, honestly!, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced.”

The narrator has been physically alone for two decades and, before that, felt alone even with the women. The narrator again wonders if her lack of interpersonal connections deprives her of human qualities, and her exclamatory interjection demonstrates her anguish. The motif of timekeeping again highlights the definitive link between Humanity and Interconnectedness. The narrator still tracks time according to the women’s 24-hour days, which restored their humanity in prison, but timekeeping now feels meaningless in her solitude.

“How could the father of Prince Hamlet, if he was dead, appear and talk to him? The dead cannot move, they decompose on the spot and in the end are reduced to bones which crumble at the slightest touch. I have seen hundreds, and none of them has ever come and talked to me in the middle of the night. And I would have been so happy if they had!”

The narrator reads Shakespeare plays in the bunker but cannot relate to anything they describe. This quote highlights the limit of her life experiences, which does not include the concept of ghosts or the supernatural. The scene also illustrates the character’s second transition from embracing solitude to craving companionship.