Forty women in an underground cage. Silent guards. No explanation. No memory of how they arrived. Just existence under constant electric light, time dissolved into indistinguishable moments, survival without meaning.
Then the siren sounds. The guards collapse. The cage opens.
Freedom arrives as inexplicable as imprisonment.
Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men refuses every narrative convention we use to make suffering tolerable. There is no villain to defeat, no mystery to solve, no redemption arc. The women escape their cage only to discover they’ve been transferred to a larger prison—a desolate plain scattered with identical bunkers, each containing forty dead women and their dead guards. The world offers no answers, no rescue, no meaning. Just the blank fact of survival.
The narrator—unnamed, raised entirely in captivity—spends her entire life searching for explanation. She never finds it. She dies alone, ignorant, writing an account that may never be read. The book is her memorial to nothing.
This is Camus made concrete. The Myth of Sisyphus rendered as lived experience rather than philosophical proposition. The absurd isn’t abstract here—it’s the daily labor of organizing life when life has no intelligible structure, maintaining humanity when you don’t know what humanity is, creating meaning in a system designed to obliterate it.
What Remains When Everything Is Taken
Strip away memory, context, explanation, hope. What persists?
The women organize themselves automatically. They designate leaders, create schedules, establish hierarchies. They do this without discussion, as if civilization itself is an involuntary reflex. Even imprisoned, they can’t help but make rules. Even absurd, they insist on order.
The narrator becomes their timekeeper, counting her heartbeats to restore the sense of hours and days the guards had dissolved. It’s rebellion and something deeper. Time requires witness. One person counting creates duration from nothing. The women had been living in eternal present—indistinguishable moments under constant light. The narrator’s heartbeat gave them back their humanity.
But what is humanity when you have no reference for it? The narrator doesn’t know if she’s human. She never menstruates like the other women. She has no memory of the world they describe. They tell her she’s different. She believes them. When they refuse to explain sex and love—withholding knowledge to maintain imaginary power over nothing—she accepts her exclusion as ontological fact.
This is where Harpman’s novel cuts deepest. The narrator’s entire concept of self is constructed from what others refuse to tell her. She’s defined by absence. And the other women, imprisoned and powerless, recreate the only form of power they remember: knowledge hoarding, hierarchy, the small cruelties that make someone else smaller so you feel larger.
They do this even though it serves nothing. Even though they’re all equally powerless. Humans create dominance structures in the absurd because that’s what humans do.
The Discovery of Love at the End of the World
The women die slowly, one by one. The narrator—who has spent her life believing herself incapable of connection, repulsed by physical touch—becomes their death attendant. She holds them when they ask, though contact disgusts her. She kills them when they beg for mercy, clean and efficient, the knife wrapped carefully so no blood shows.
This becomes her final intimacy with each woman. The only touch she can bear is the one that ends suffering.
And then, too late, she understands. The trust she felt with Anthea, the preference for her company, the joy at reunion—that was love. She’d been loving without recognizing it. She’d been human all along, just without the vocabulary.
She discovers this the moment everyone is gone.
The narrator spends her final years alone in an underground shelter she discovers—a home, beautifully furnished, stocked with books about experiences she’s never had. She reads about love and marriage and can’t comprehend them. She looks in the mirror and likes her face because it’s the only human face she sees. She addresses God experimentally, her voice hoarse from disuse, asking for conversation. She receives silence.
She realizes she’s spent her entire life “doing I don’t know what.” Walking, surviving, searching. For nothing. Biological persistence until biology fails.
The Refusal of Meaning
Buddhist thought teaches that suffering arises from attachment to permanence, from the insistence that things should last, should mean something, should cohere into narrative. The narrator’s suffering isn’t from captivity—she has no memory of freedom to mourn. Her suffering is from the search for explanation that never arrives.
She wants the world to be intelligible. She wants her life to signify. She wants someone to have meant this.
The world offers none of that. It just is. Absurd. Indifferent. Vast.
Christian mysticism talks about the dark night of the soul—the experience of God’s absence, the silence that follows prayer. But that tradition promises eventual union, eventual understanding. The narrator prays to emptiness and receives emptiness. There is no divine hidden beneath the silence. There’s just silence.
Existentialism suggests we create meaning through action, through choice, through the assertion of will against an indifferent universe. But what meaning can you create when you don’t know what world you’re in, what species you belong to, whether other humans still exist? The narrator chooses to keep walking, keep searching. That doesn’t make the searching meaningful. It just makes it what she did with the time she had.
Harpman refuses every consolation. There is no heroism here, no noble suffering, no redemption through witness. The narrator writes her account hoping someone will read it, making herself real retroactively through being seen. But we—the actual readers—can’t reach her. She’s already dead in whatever world she occupied. We can witness but not rescue. We can understand but not save.
Organizing in the Void
Here’s what haunts me about this book: the women organize even when organization serves nothing. They create time when time is arbitrary. They establish roles when roles are meaningless. They do this because humans organize. We make civilization reflexively, like breathing.
This observation becomes political fast. We live in systems that imprison us—not with bars but with structures that claim inevitability, naturalness, the way things are. We organize our oppression and call it order. We create hierarchies that harm everyone, including those at the top, because dominance structures are what we do.
The guards in Harpman’s novel die alongside their prisoners. Whatever catastrophe occurred killed them all. They weren’t the enemy—they were victims in uniforms, following orders they probably didn’t understand, maintaining a system that imprisoned them too. The narrator realizes this late: the guards were as trapped as the women they guarded. The cages held everyone.
Power structures depend on the imprisoned maintaining their own captivity. On guards who don’t question orders. On victims who recreate dominance hierarchies among themselves because that’s the only model they know. The women could have resisted differently, organized differently, created something other than pale imitations of the hierarchy that caged them.
They didn’t. Not because they lacked capacity but because that’s what humans do. Even in the absurd, we recreate what we know.
The Act of Witness
The narrator concludes that time is created through conversation—speaking and being heard creates duration, creates existence. She writes her account hoping someone will read it, that witness will make her real.
We read. She becomes real. For a moment, across whatever distance separates her world from ours, she exists in our minds. The witness arrives too late to save her but in time to confirm she lived.
This is all we get. Not explanation. Not rescue. Not meaning. Just the bare fact of witness. Someone lived. Someone suffered. Someone searched for understanding they never found. We know this happened because we read the words they left behind.
Maybe that’s what remains when everything else is stripped away. Not knowledge or meaning or redemption. Just the stubborn act of witness. The insistence on recording what occurred even if no one comes. The choice to write the account, to count the heartbeats, to create time in the timeless void.
Humans organize. Humans witness. Even in the absurd. Especially in the absurd.
I Who Have Never Known Men offers no comfort and no answers. It suggests that humanity isn’t what we know or remember but what we do when everything intelligible gets taken. We count. We organize. We witness. We write the account.
Whether anyone reads it remains uncertain. Whether it means anything, more uncertain still.
But we do it anyway. That’s what makes us human.
Even alone, in the void, dying without understanding—we insist on being seen.
