OCT 24, 2024 | ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT | By Greta Patterson
Light spoilers included.
Hello readers, and welcome back to Book of the Block. As the weather gets colder and snow begins to fall on Tava Peak, I have an inclination to only talk about “Twilight” and how we’re finally back in sweater weather. For all of our sakes, I will not be talking about “Twilight” but instead one of the most beautiful, intriguing novels I’ve read in a long time. “I Who Have Never Known Men” by Jacqueline Harpman is deeply emotional despite its unique plot and gives a beautiful insight into relationships, society, what it means to love and everything that makes us human.
The novel follows a young nameless narrator through her dystopian life. She has always lived in a windowless cage with 39 other women, none of whom remember how they came to live in the cage or how much time has passed since they first arrived. Their amnesia is likely drug-induced and sustained by their lack of desire to talk about their individual histories. In this cage they are given sleeping pads, minimal food, one toilet and zero privacy. They are constantly patrolled by male guards who never speak and rarely look at them yet are always watching. If the women try to touch one another, a whip cracks, threatening violence. If the women attempt to kill themselves, a whip cracks again, telling them that there is no escape from this life. In short, the women are merely surviving.
As our narrator gets older, even though her age is unknown, she begins to understand more and more of this existence that they all live in. Given that she has never known a life outside of the cage, her perspective is nuanced and inquisitive. She questions the system in which she lives, a trait that opposes the other womens’ mindless acceptance of that which they cannot change.
In the pivotal moment of the novel, an alarm sounds and all of the guards immediately leave the cage which had just been unlocked to give the women food. The women are at first apprehensive to leave out of fear that the guards will come back, yet eventually the narrator sprints up the stairs until she is outside, something she has never experienced. As they look at the barren landscape where the bunker resides under, they begin to realize that they are not on Earth but a different planet entirely. There is no trace of the guards or where they went, leaving the women truly alone.
Throughout the rest of the novel, the women walk across the planes and find other bunkers, some with men and some with women, all of whom are dead as their cages were locked when the alarm sounded. The women begin to realize that they are truly alone and begin to create a society for themselves with home-like structures and romantic relationships. The narrator finds great joy in building and learning, yet quickly gets tired of the stagnant existence that they occupy once again.
By the end of the novel, the narrator is alone in the most literal sense. All of the women from her bunker died before her due to her being the youngest. In her grappling with this, the reader feels all the same questions as the narrator due to the unexplained circumstances of their existence. Despite a persistent sense of hope that she will find other people, be rescued or have some resolution, she ultimately dies never knowing why her life has been what it was. While this can be viewed as a tragedy, there is something deeply human about the truth remaining just out of reach.
Ultimately, this is a novel about love, existence and what it means to be human. The narrator believes she has never known love, yet as her relationships with certain characters develop, readers can begin to understand that she does feel love in a different way. She has never interacted with a man and thus only knows the love and care of a woman and of the community which they built as a means of survival in a world that forgot them.
The book is a deep-dive into loneliness and our need for connection as a way of experiencing the world. While we may be able to survive off of having our basic needs such as food and water met, that is not a life. So hug your friends, call your mom and find appreciation of all the things that connect us to each other.