Annotation: Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream · 7:57am Jan 10th, 2014
Inspired by Bad Horse's annotation of Torn Apart & Devoured by Lions, I am going to do the same with the last scene of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, available here and here.
red = adverb
brown = telling an emotion outright
green = simile or metaphor
blue = an adjective, adverb, or verb that isn't literally correct (metaphorical)
lavender = body language
Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don't know. AM has been having fun for some time, accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word now. Now. It took me ten months to say now. I don't know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.
He was furious. He wouldn't let me bury them. It didn't matter. There was no way to dig up the deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn't do a thing; they stayed dead. I'd had him. He was furious. I had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It was not even a shadow of the hate he now slavered from every printed circuit. He made certain I would suffer eternally and could not do myself in.
He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. I remember all four of them. I wish—
Well, it doesn't make any sense. I know I saved them, I know I saved them from what has happened to me, but still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen's face. It isn't easy. Sometimes I want to, it doesn't matter.
AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn't want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.
AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge …
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
While I was shopping my first story around for reviews, someone recommended this story to me as an example of how to make my writing read less like a comic book script. (Though I sadly did not experience the story until years later.) Content aside, this is very much a story that Equestria Daily would have no problems featuring, though our narrator, Ted, tells us what the characters are feeling six times in this scene alone.
But it works here for a few reasons: none of the characters can exactly use body language to show emotion at the moment, the fourth one is accompanied by prose that paints a very vivid mental picture, and they’re spread out well, pacing-wise. The scene before this was very tense, with a lot of action, so the telling here gives the reader a moment to breath so they don’t feel exhausted. So that the ending doesn’t feel too abrupt.
Now, the fact that AM can’t show his emotions directly gives him a very Lovecraftian presence. He literally is everywhere: a computer covering the entire planet, created to wage a war too complex for humans to comprehend. Because Ted tells us how he feels, it just makes him that much less human, that much more frightening.
As for the metaphorical language, that part was fairly hard for me to pin down. This is a very weird story, with a lot of strange and unusual things happening. Because of this, it’s very hard to know what’s metaphorical and what’s real. I have struggled with this in some of my own, currently unfinished stories.
For those who haven’t played the game adaptation, it is very much up to interpretation which words were metaphorical and which weren’t. Ted could actually have flesh made out of Jell-O and rubber, and AM might have actually roared like a lion. The cliché of “His eyes rolled down her dress” takes on a whole new meaning if “he” is a zombie.
***
If enough people ask, I might do more posts like these, maybe comparing the game adaptation with the short story. Maybe annotations of other stories. I could probably talk endlessly about Harlan Ellison himself.
Though brief, your analysis by the end of this blogpost was awesome! I'd love to see you extend something like this to thousands of words. Would be engaging as two Hells.
I think that the narrator alternates between short, clipped sentences, & long ones to show how he slips in and out of his hellish reverie. I like the adverbs at the end; they're carefully-chosen ones, not the common "quickly", "probably", etc., and Ellison highlights them deliberately. (You missed "simply" at the very end.)
1702559
Heh, you made this look real easy in your posts.
nice work on a brilliant piece of Lit. I've adore the story and game quite a lot and its good to see people talk and analyze it in any fashion