I Who Have Never Known Men—does it get better?
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Anonymous
But how is that fundamentally different from us? We also live within overlapping, fractured, and competing cultures. We’re constantly negotiating identities in relation to people whose values, histories, and assumptions differ from our own; colleagues, neighbors, friends from different cultural backgrounds. Opposition to a culture doesn’t place you outside it; it’s one of the ways you exist within it. Even if we say her formative years are “blank,” they’re not blank in any neutral sense. They’re blank except for the women and the bunker. Her first language, her first model of authority, her first understanding of fear, routine, discipline, even solidarity, all of that comes from that enclosed world. So if her experience and abilities differ from the older women, that difference still emerges from the same cultural soil. It’s a variation within the system, not an escape from it. In that way, she resembles the older women more than it might first appear. They were shaped by the world before the cage and then violently severed from it. She’s shaped by the cage and then severed from that. Both experience rupture from the only shared framework that made their identities coherent. She isn’t outside culture, she’s formed in a fractured one and then forced to confront its absence. So maybe the real question isn’t whether she exists outside culture, but whether the novel suggests that any self can. |
Anonymous
To me this points to the universal way of all teenagers, no matter the circumstances in which they are raised. |
Anonymous
This is a great synopsis. I finished it a couple of days ago. I'm not sure if I liked it, but it was successful in making me think. Questions like why go on living at all? Where does the protagonist's motivation to do so come from and does she ever truly accept that no one will ever come? I was very disquieted by all the other bunkers and found it a little strange that none of the women voiced regret at not setting off earlier - they could have saved some of those people (my assumption was that the others died of starvation). A fun literary exercise would be to invite authors to write short stories that expound on some of the unanswered questions in the book. |
Anonymous
I was left wondering something similar: what if the Child had set off herself, alone, and left the slower women behind? They had food and shelter there. Could ALL of the others have been found and saved? Could she have applied the same mathematical logic and found them all in quick succession? Or, would things have turned into anarchy? Alone, the group had their own government of sorts, it’s even described in the book. |
Anonymous
Hated both books lol! |
Anonymous
Really, really hated The Alchemist but loved I Who. |