32 pages • 1 hour read
Harlan EllisonI Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Canned Goods
The canned goods represent the cruelty of the hope that AM gives the survivors. Promising a small reprieve from their suffering in the form of palatable food, the group sets off on a years-long trek to seek out the ice caverns and the promised stash of preserved food. Nimdok hallucinates the existence of the canned goods, and Ellen fixates on them as a way of surviving, hoping for “peaches or Bartlett pears” (1), a concrete reminder of the pleasures of their old lives.
Once the survivors—injured, starving, and exhausted—reach the canned goods in the ice cavern, they realize that they have no way to open them. Benny, after trying and failing to bash the cans open on the rocks, succumbs to his hunger and attacks Gorrister, eating the flesh of his face. The loss of this symbol of hope shows the machine’s desire to witness their suffering. However, Ted’s unexpected attack on his fellow survivors, sparing them from AM, would not have been possible if they hadn’t journeyed to the ice caverns on AM’s promise. The canned goods, while not the saving grace they were promised to be, were still the impetus of the group’s ultimate escape from AM. In that way, the canned goods also represent sincere hope.
Icicles
The icicles represent the unpredictability of humanity’s inventions. AM, full of hatred for its makers, who gave it no way to exercise creativity, can only pull from the knowledge it already possesses. It cannot improvise based on its surroundings, which is why it endeavors to control its surroundings completely. However, Ted, as a human, can take advantage of a random opportunity to accomplish his goal. He has no weapons to kill his friends to save them, and normally, he would have no way to do so without the machine stopping him.
In this context, after AM tricks them into going after inaccessible food, after they reach a desolate, frozen cavern, and after Benny attacks Gorrister and causes the icicles to fall, Ted sees his opportunity and takes it, killing his friends with the icicles before the machine can react. This symbolizes the ability of the human spirit to meet its goals, even in unexpected ways. AM’s hatred of Ted revolves around his ability to access a uniquely-human trait that AM was never given.
Giant Bird
The giant bird created by AM represents the outsized, omnipotent power that AM wields. AM reveals that the hurricane it created was actually the work of this giant bird of his making. The bird is monstrous, and Ellison uses vivid imagery to describe it:
There on a mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own irregular breathing, its snake neck arching up into the gloom beneath the North Pole, supporting a head as large as a Tudor mansion; a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most monstrous crocodile ever conceived, sensuously; ridges of tufted flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly […]. Then it settled and slept. Talons. Fangs. Nails. Blades. It slept (8).
This grotesque description parallels AM’s brutal actions up until this point, including dangling facsimiles of the survivors’ corpses in their faces.
AM instructs the survivors to kill the bird for food but provides them with no real weapons with which to accomplish the task. Defeated, the group leaves the bird and continues their search for the canned goods. However, in studying the bird, Ted subconsciously realizes that it is also a sign of AM’s limitations. AM created the bird from mythologies and existing birds. Ted wonders how AM made the bird and deduces that “[f]rom Norse mythology it had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huergelmir. The wind creature. Hurakan incarnate” (8). He references old mythology to explain the monster, proving that AM is trapped and limited by its own nature.
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By Harlan Ellison
