i who have never known men by jacqueline harpman

Although most of the women are happy, the narrator is restless. They create a small village for themselves by a river. The women eventually decide to settle down. However, each bunker holds the same horror: a locked cage filled with the mummified bodies of both women and men. When they start discovering other bunkers like the one where they were held, they hope they will find an unlocked cage. Over the course of the following weeks, the women begin to wander the desolate, indistinguishable landscape where they find themselves. Indeed, the women have been delivered into the world above.

She is thrilled to have escaped the cage and bunker. Once they are gone, the narrator retrieves the key and frees the women.Īlthough the other women are convinced that the guards will return, the narrator is unafraid. At the sound of the alarm, the guards flee. Not long later, an alarm goes off at the very moment one of the guards is unlocking the cage to feed the women. Anthea is kind to the narrator and humors her questions and ideas. Over the course of the weeks that follow, the two foster a kinship. However, because she knows nothing about men, about sex, or even about her own body, she does not know how to name what she is feeling. These private fantasies grant her sexual pleasure. In an effort to have a secret of her own, the narrator begins inventing stories for herself. When she asks questions, they dismiss her and refuse to relay their stories to her. However, whenever she approaches, they stop their chatter. Indeed, they are often talking and laughing amongst themselves. When the narrator is roughly 15 or 16 years old, she begins to realize that the other women know things that she does not. Although they are fed, allowed to wash and converse, and given mattresses to sleep on, they have no other comforts or freedoms.

They are constantly watched by a set of perpetually rotating guards. In the cage, the women have no understanding of why they are being held captive. Because she is so young, the other women guess she was grouped with them by mistake. When the narrator is a child, she is ripped from her home and family and imprisoned in a cage underground with 39 other women. The following summary adheres to a more linear mode of explanation and relies upon the present tense. For this reason, she employs both the past and present tenses. The narrator is also writing from a retrospective angle. Therefore, because the unnamed narrator is unable to explain the reasons for her circumstances, she cannot relay them to the reader. Set in an unidentified dystopian universe, the narrative world remains mysterious to the first person narrator and protagonist throughout. Jacqueline Harpman's novel I Who Have Never Known Men is a work of speculative fiction. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Harpman, Jacqueline.

I who have never known men by jacqueline harpman