I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” begins in medias res, startling the reader as much as the characters with the sudden image of Gorrister’s brutally-murdered corpse. Situating the beginning of the story in this horrible moment without any preamble or setup underlines the relentless torment of the five survivors. Every moment, to them, constitutes a new horror, and AM’s twisting of their consciousnesses removes their abilities to fully understand or situate themselves in time and space. Ellison’s choice to throw the reader into the story in the middle of a moment allies the reader with the characters and creates a tone of disjointed, paranoid terror.

Ted, the sole narrator, provides the only point of view that the reader can access. Throughout the story, it becomes clear that his point of view is twisted and unreliable. Through his actions, Ted shows concern and care for his fellow survivors, though in his head, he often succumbs to paranoid hatred. Ted insists that AM has manipulated the minds and bodies of his friends but not his. He believes that he is the only objective observer left among his group, but the reader realizes through the course of the story that Ted’s observations often contradict each other, or he steadfastly believes in his own understanding despite being confronted with evidence to the contrary.

At the beginning of the story, Ted seems rational, though despondent and bitter. By the point in their journey in which Benny is blinded by AM, Ted’s rationality starts to fracture. His dread gets the better of him as he perceives a terrible rush of evil smells, sounds, and sensations coming toward him, and he flees from his friends to escape it. He hears his friends laugh at him, and he begins a vicious tirade against them, believing them all to be “lined and arrayed against [him]” (5). He begins to obsess over his compatriots’ flaws, and his vitriol is especially jarring when directed at Ellen. He erupts into a rant using degrading terms:

Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe: that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn't nice to do (5).

At this point, the reader starts to doubt Ted’s perceptions, since his statements contradict Ellen’s stated feelings. Ted’s arc through the text paints him as an antihero. However, Ted’s perspective is all the reader can access. In this way, Ellison forces the reader to contend with Ted’s vulnerability, since his dread, paranoia, and anxiety are all the reader has to anchor the narrative.

As unreliable as Ted’s internal landscape is, it is mirrored by the uncertainty and danger of the characters’ surroundings. The narrator reveals that the characters are physically trapped inside of AM, as it has colonized the Earth, deepening the bleak tone and the theme of The Dystopic Nature of War and Technology:

We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us (7).

Earlier in the story, Gorrister states that in making AM, scientists “sank the first shafts and began building” (6), implying that AM is integrated into the crust of the Earth. He goes on to state that “[t]here was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet” (6). This aligns with the survivors’ experience in traveling through vast, endless tunnels filled with “chittering” machinery, at one point getting close enough to the surface of the Earth to see “light filtering down from above” (2). They are at once inside the Earth and inside AM, which highlights their helplessness in the face of AM’s vast power.

Additionally, AM can control the weather and create phenomena such as beams of light, disembodied sounds, and even creatures like the “great mad bird” (8) that creates the hurricane that separates their group. However, AM’s powers have limits; along with being unable to create new life, it cannot truly control its human prisoners or anticipate their actions. Ted’s choice to save his friends by putting an end to their misery is beyond AM’s predictive technology, and when he uses giant fallen icicles to kill them, he ultimately saves them from AM. They are free in death because AM can’t resurrect them. This shows that as frightening and all-powerful AM is within himself, he is still somewhat forced to adapt to his surroundings, just like his prisoners.

The malleability of the prisoners’ surroundings creates a fully-unstable narrative: Unable to trust either the narrator’s point of view or the setting in which he exists, the reader experiences the dread and despair of the characters, only able to wait for the next crisis to come and see if the group survives it.

At the end of the story, all of Ted’s friends are dead by his hand, and AM furiously takes away the final concrete certainty of Ted’s existence: his human form. AM transforms Ted into “a great soft jelly thing” (11). Ellison uses vivid imagery here to convey the visceral horror of Ted’s new body: “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” (11). With Ted’s mind already suspect in its ability to perceive reality, his body is reduced to an undefined, inhuman blob, and he and the reader are deprived of all possibilities of certainty.

The only concrete truth Ted could cling to was that he once had comrades in his suffering, and now he does not. Here, Ellison drives home the point that resistance is possible only through solidarity; with Ellen’s help, Ted liberated his four friends. Alone, however, there is no hope.