49 pages • 1 hour read
Jacqueline HarpmanI Who Have Never Known Men
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 152-206Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 152-168 Summary
The narrator buries Laura near the other graves and goes to bed, but she is too excited about her departure to sleep much. She begins packing at three o’clock. She returns to the nearby bunker for supplies and looks at the prison’s male corpses again. She is used to seeing tortured poses and chaotic gestures among the bodies in the various cages, but here she sees one man seated upright, apart from the others. She wonders if he died last, perhaps after mercifully killing some of his companions, as she has done. She thinks he looks proud, “with an air of self-respect and defiance” (154). The narrator says that she will die like that, upright and proud.
She leaves before dawn, not feeling the need to sleep and realizing her schedule only matters to her now. She heads toward the rising sun because of its beauty. As she passes the cemetery, she thinks of Anthea. Reflecting, the elderly narrator says that the trust they shared and the joy of their togetherness “were probably what the women called love” (157).
As she treks, the narrator encounters many bunkers. She always views the corpses out of respect and then closes the main door as a tribute. However, she no longer leaves any signs of her visit. She thinks that even if there were other escapees, it is unlikely they outlived the women.
The narrator wonders if she will find anything new, such as the power plant that keeps the prisons’ electricity running. The contents of the bunkers are nearly identical and offer no new information, but that fact gives her a theory: Perhaps the guards knew no more than the prisoners. The new thought thrills her. She expects to have good dreams that night and awakens with a vague memory of enjoying the company of men and women in her sleep.
During a year of exploration, the food stores offer small variations, and the narrator savors novelties. The terrain changes, and she climbs every hill with hope of discovery. She enjoys swimming in deeper rivers and examining new vegetation. One day, she sees what seems to match the women’s description of a road, so she follows it. Then, at the bottom of a long hill, she sees a bus.
Pages 169-184 Summary
At first, the narrator is unsure what the large rectangular object is, never having seen a bus before. She races down the hill but stops suddenly when she sees human figures through the windows. She enters the bus and finds skeletons—wearing guards’ uniforms and strange masks—sitting upright as if they died instantly. Each has a type of bag she never sees in the bunkers. She trembles with excitement as she opens one.
Although she cannot immediately identify everything, the narrator finds a jacket, paper, a razor, towels, underpants, a glass bottle, and a book, which overwhelms her. She says, “I had in my hands the most precious of treasures, a spring from which to drink the knowledge of that world to which I would never have access” (172). Anthea taught her the alphabet by drawing in the sand, but she cannot read well. Excitement and tiredness sap her concentration, and she puts the book aside. Fatigued from emotions, she falls asleep.
Over the next several days, she buries the bodies to honor the dead. When resting, she studies the book A Condensed Gardening Handbook. She enjoys learning despite the uselessness of the information in that barren environment. She takes a few items from the guards’ bags and sets out to replenish her water supply, following the road.
One night she has a dream that she is sitting on the bus with the guards, listening to them speak. The dream produces an orgasm that awakens her, and she feels sad knowing the presence of men can induce that sensation, which is only available to her in dreams. She thinks of the despair that the women suffered and ponders her own desire to live. Looking out at the vast, unexplored land, however, reawakens her curiosity.
As she travels, she practices writing, using her book for examples and drawing in the dirt. She also maps her excursions in new ways and determines the bunkers are arranged in groups of five. Finding one means she knows where four more are, and she always goes down to pay her respects to the victims whether she needs supplies or not.
Pages 185-206 Summary
On one of her treks, the narrator finds an unnatural arrangement of stones piled knee-high. As she removes them, she fears the disappointment of discovering nothing underneath. Instead, she uncovers a spiral staircase and is dizzy with excitement. Below is a bunker unlike the prisons. It is well decorated, elaborately furnished, and carpeted. There is a kitchen, bathroom, bookshelf, and bed. The home’s beauty overwhelms her.
Although she still goes on expeditions, she makes that bunker her home base for 22 years. She reads all the books, learns to use the oven, experiences hot baths, and sleeps with her head on a pillow. She also sees her reflection in a mirror for the first time. She enjoys learning her facial expressions and receiving a friendly smile. Finding reams of paper and a box of pencils, the narrator learns to write and draw well. She reads Shakespearean plays and Dostoevsky novels as well as books on astronautics. However, nothing she finds in the home or on her many explorations teaches her anything more about the mysterious world she inhabits.
She becomes very lonely and grieves the death of Anthea. Moreover, she starts to believe again that another survivor may exist. She shouts into the wilderness, asking if anyone can hear her. She also builds a huge fire that would be visible from far away and keeps it burning all night.
On her last trip, when she spots a cabin, she does not enter it, feeling her hopes have waned. Still, she writes her life story, thinking someday a human may arrive and read her message. In that way, she may live on, but she doubts anyone will come.
The narrator knows she is ill. Her symptoms resemble Mary-Jane’s, so she suspects she has cancer in her reproductive organs. As she has never had periods or been with a man, she finds it strange to be dying from a disease in her womb. The pain is excruciating and frequent, making life intolerable. When she finishes writing her story, she plans to stab her own heart, sitting upright with dignity
Pages 152-206 Analysis
The final section explores the theme of Humanity and Interconnectedness through the motif of timekeeping. Time is again shown to be a social construct when the narrator realizes solitude makes schedules meaningless. She can trek, eat, and sleep whenever her body indicates energy, hunger, or exhaustion. Even day and night no longer regulate how she perceives time. She still tracks time according to the women's clock and calendar, but she questions if time even exists in isolation—and if she is human without it.
In this final section, character development takes a similar arc as in the first section. The protagonist resents the women for being barriers to knowledge, and she thrives on independent discoveries before recognizing the value of human interactions. After Laura’s death, the narrator is thrilled to explore without the restraints of others’ needs. Her first night, she is too tired to warm her food but thinks “it [is] pleasantly seasoned with the feeling of having complete freedom at last” (159).
However, the narrator gradually develops the desire for human companionship. As she treks, she has pleasant dreams of being in the company of men and women and has moments of nostalgia when contemplating her solitude. Likewise, in her bunker home, she treats the mirror as a companion with whom she trades smiles. With time, however, dramatic imagery portrays her desperation. In addition to lighting fires and shouting, she says she would welcome a conversation with a bunker’s corpse, as Hamlet had with his father’s ghost in the Shakespeare play she reads. She even cries out for a few words from the Christian God she heard about, saying she is lonely.
Although the narrator craves companionship and grieves for Anthea, jarring diction illustrates her continued struggle with feelings and touch. She tries to imagine warmly holding Anthea, creating the image of two women embracing, but then says, “[T]there is always a point when the whip cracks” (191). On the broadest symbolic level, the narrator’s internalization of the lash of the guard’s whip symbolizes the fear a violent patriarchal society forces on women to keep them from forming strong bonds with one another. On an individual level, the trauma the narrator internalizes from the guard’s whip solidifies the connection between physical intimacy and punishment so that she can never fully embrace the idea of physically loving another person.
The narrator’s detachment makes her question her human characteristics, but this section enriches the theme of Humanity and Interconnectedness as she goes to great lengths to honor the dead. Although she neither likes Laura nor expects her grave to be visited, the narrator ensures that the body is transported with dignity, strewn with flowers, and covered without disrupting Laura's smoothened hair. Likewise, she visits the cage of every bunker she finds (except the last), forces herself to view the bodies, and shuts the main door to show respect. Moreover, despite her traumatic imprisonment, the protagonist takes three days to carefully bury the busload of guards, creating a circular pattern and laying their weapons atop their graves.
Her theory of the guards as ignorant pawns is one of many examples of her ability to find meaning and purpose in a dearth of information. The lack of individuality in the guards’ quarters prompts her new idea, which she considers most precious. She also studies their meaningless gardening books to enrich her imagination and advance her reading skills. Likewise, she uses diagrams in the cryptic aeronautics texts to develop drafting skills for mapping excursions, expanding the theme of The Intrinsic Value of Thinking and Knowledge.
This section also reveals that in the narrator’s quest for new ideas, she does not like to cover familiar ground. She does not want to return to the bus and retrieve a gun, even though she suspects it could be useful, because it involves retracing her steps. Likewise, when she loses the road, she dislikes retracing her steps to search for it. She tells the reader that she will not relay the difficulty of identifying the guard’s possessions because it would involve repeating herself, which she finds unpleasant. This trait highlights the narrator’s sacrifice in adapting to the women’s routine-bound lifestyle, enhancing the theme of Humanity and Interconnectedness. Now, without the restraint of others’ routines, she can continue her unbounded exploration.
Although the protagonist plans to explore until her death without expectations about what she will find, she admits to disappointment when novelties and information are lacking. Each time, however, her curiosity refuels her drive. For example, amid the bus’s mysteries, she says she is satisfied to collect more questions even if there are no answers. Likewise, when the road dead-ends, remapping her route relieves her melancholy. These scenes both deepen the theme of Curiosity Versus Expectation and highlight the character’s enduring motivation.
With time, however, her curiosity wanes. When she is uncovering the hatch to the underground home, she fears she will find only more questions, which she calls “worthless treasures.” The oxymoron reveals her mind’s conflicting forces of disappointment and wonder. Likewise, she uses a simile comparing the mysterious world that “wearies” her to a jigsaw puzzle, which she says she would have liked. Indeed, she explores for another two decades but gradually stops contemplating the unknown. Then, on her last excursion, she returns home without entering the new bunker she finds, signaling a major turning point for her character. Her expectation that the contents will be familiar indicates that her motivation has dissipated, and without that, she has no reason to live.
The text never resolves its mysteries, such as how the barren world maintains electricity. The absence of animals could indicate an extinction-level event, while the aeronautics book suggests the possibility of space travel. The narrator’s deduction about the guards’ intermediary role in whatever system imprisoned the women suggests there is a higher impersonal (or inhuman) authority whose goals are never revealed. The reason for having exactly 39 prisoners in each bunker and why the men were separated from women is never revealed, nor is the reason the women were able to escape. In the absence of a traditional plot, the story revolves around the narrator’s experience of her body and the passage of time. Her writing frames the narrative, imposing structure on events that are otherwise directionless. In the end, readers are left to wonder if anyone will come along to read her writing and if any surprises are hiding behind the unopened bunker door.
