Underground in a cavernous concrete bunker lay 39 women and one young girl. They are not there for safety from a doomsday scenario, or even there by choice. Instead, they are confined to a cage constructed in the middle of the room. It is surrounded by three guards at all times who pace up and down the space between the bars and the walls. The guards remain faceless, voiceless entities; all three move in tandem and express arbitrary rules to the women by periodically lashing out with whips. Never do they look at them, and never do they speak to them.

The world that Jacqueline Harpman creates in her novel “I Who Have Never Known Men” is bleak. Under a gray sky lit artificially, the women and the guards are victims of a system that they don’t know the origin of, but continue to perpetuate. 

Set from the perspective of the young girl in the bunker who is telling her life story from many years in the future, the reader explores the world that Harpman has constructed through the narrator’s perspective while she offers a reflection of her life. It’s through this narrative that the author reflects on the consequences of oppression and what it means to be human. 

By the end of this novel, I was almost left with more questions than answers; I believe that I will have to read this novel again in order to fully understand what Harpman is saying. Yet, even in this reread I know that certain questions will never be answered. 

By the end, the mystery of why the women are in the cage is never solved and as frustrating as this is, it makes sense. Not everything has an answer that can be easily found, and even if that answer is found, chances are it won’t fully make sense. 

By not answering this mystery, Harpman allows the reader to put more focus on the world from the women’s perspective and empathize with their actions and emotions. That is the strength of this novel: its focus is not an impossible mystery but the persistence of humanity and how we define ourselves when stripped of everything.