“As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker. Is that what they mean by memories?”¹

What good is knowledge? What good is knowledge if I can’t explain why something is the way it is, only that it is the way it is? Can I share an experience with someone else if I don’t know why I experienced it myself? Can I trust my own mind if I can’t remember what I did yesterday, whether I showered in the morning or the night? Can I exist to another person if no one has ever spoken my name? Can I call myself a woman if I’ve never even bled? 

Surrounded by thirty-nine older women and guarded by silent, armed men, Jacqueline Harpman’s narrator holds a memory of nothing prior to her cage: no life before, no childhood home, no mother figure among her fellow captives. The narrator is unnamed, and she does not just lack her history, but also the linguistic and conceptual framework required to evaluate her own lack.

In many forms of narrative, the pursuit of knowledge carries a redemptive promise. In classical epics, Gothic mysteries, and detective fiction alike, discovering the truth restores social order, grants justice, brings you closer to the gods, or exposes hidden corruption. Yet curiosity is rarely a solitary pursuit for long; to seek knowledge is ultimately to seek connection. Curiosity is the engine of the hero’s journey, as seen in characters like Odysseus deciphering his way home, or Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale clinging to forbidden words to keep her identity alive. Most of what we know is not individually discovered but inherited. We know about distant galaxies only because of centuries of astronomical record-keeping and generations of curiosity about our universe, and we wouldn’t have our own history without language and literature through oral tradition. Things are taught through language, passed down through cultural customs, corrected by peers, and confirmed through shared experience. Knowledge binds human beings into a temporal community, connecting the living to the dead and the individual to the collective. To discover a secret that could change what you already know is to unlock liberation, or at least to achieve catharsis. Yet I Who Have Never Known Men operates under a far more merciless premise. The novel systematically withholds every answer the narrator seeks: why they were caged, who their captors were, what cataclysm cleared the earth above, and what kind of life was stolen from them.

Now that I mention Offred’s search for identity, those who are familiar with Atwood’s novel may find that it is almost impossible to read Harpman’s novel without sensing the ghostly kinship they share. Both texts trap young women in a dystopian, stripped-down gender hierarchy where female bodies are monitored, history is erased, and language is tightly policed. Yet where Atwood’s Offred holds onto pre-Gilead memories like smells, pop songs and love letters, Harpman’s narrator has no ‘before’ to remember. Her world feels even more starkly totalitarian because there is no lost paradise to pine for; no resistance movement operating behind the scenes like Offred had. If Atwood explores how women survive the sudden destruction of their world, Harpman dares to ask an even colder question: Can I learn what it means to be human if no one was there to teach me?

Knowledge empowers. We seek explanations because understanding a problem usually suggests a path towards fixing it. But for Harpman’s narrator, who is eventually freed from her cage only to wander an empty, ruined world alongside aging companions, explanation—if it ever came—would amount to nothing. Had a voice descended from the sky to detail the exact geopolitical or apocalyptic reasons for their imprisonment, the narrator’s condition would remain unchanged. She would still be part of the forty women who would grow old and die; the youth, intimacy and social ties denied to her would remain forever unlived. Knowledge in this novel would not turn back the clock, and would not populate a dead world. 

When the narrator seeks to understand the world outside the bunker, she is not seeking a way back to normalcy—if there is one. She can only measure the parameters of her exile. The clarity knowledge provides is cold, but it is accurate. When she finds other bunkers filled with corpses, or when she maps the endless expanse of the plain, her findings evaporate into the air. Knowledge, the novel suggests, derives much of its consoling power from continuity—from the act of saying to another human being, Look at this, do you see it too? Without a peer to mirror her thoughts, or to share a shred of experience, the narrator’s knowledge remains a solitary monument to an unrecorded life. It makes me think of how far we could get without discussing with another person—or some secret you’ve shared with your best friend being still stuck in your mind rather than out in the open, itching for advice. Shared experiences and shared knowledge are the glue of our human culture. Without a listener, an observation or revelation remains a ghost, trapped forever inside the mind that thought of it in the first place. 

The narrator’s puberty is stunted. She explains that her body underwent minor changes, like growing pubic hair and small breasts, but then her development abruptly halted, and she never menstruated: “They nearly all menstruated, and how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has? I felt they were deceiving me”. Because menstruation is something “everyone else has” that she lacks, her initial self-defensive instinct is to suspect that they are making it up to trick her. Although fifteen year-old girls may not have the brightest of ideas, she doesn’t know what motherhood is, and is left completely alienated from the older women’s shared biological reality. And of course, most importantly, we don’t know the narrator’s real name. Knowledge is something withheld from us, too.

It’s a short novel, and we are still left with questions. Were they even still on earth, or is this novel set on some terraformed satellite? What value does an individual life hold, like the one of our narrator, when its entire story unfolds in absolute, unrecorded isolation? It is normal to have several interpretations of a book—the Bible has many—but this book takes it to another level, almost catastrophically so. Our experience with being handed no answers on a plate aligns with the narrator’s own mental imprisonment. Why? Because to grant the reader a neat, omniscient explanation would betray her reality. By trapping us in the same dark void of unanswerable questions, Harpman allows us to feel the weight of the narrator's intellectual solitude. Knowledge may never save us from our own solitary cages, but the courage to ask questions is the one thing that keeps us human.