Analysis Of 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream'

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“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” was a fiction short story, written by Harlan Ellison, and first published in IF Magazine: Worlds of Science Fiction on March 1967. It was about a painful journey of five people. Ted, the narrator of this story, described that other four people (Gorrister, Benny, Nimdoc and Ellen) who had already been altered by AM, the supercomputer which had own self aware, and himself can not stand the food provided by AM and started to look for canned food. However, after they found the canned food, they have no means to open it. To help companions to stopped misery, Ted killed all other four people.
In the article, the most interesting thing is that when Ted describes AM, he uses a lot of different nouns and pronouns. “But the machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back there, all around us, he snickered. It snickered.”, in these sentences, Ted uses three different nouns, “the machine”, “he” and “it” to described AM. Not only the beginning of the essay, many other places also shows Ted’s uncertainty to AM such as ‘It was a mark of his personality: it strove for perfection” and “AM wasn 't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity”. It shows …show more content…

But today, there are many fiction stories or films having similar ideas such as The Terminator. AM in this story can control human and laugh at human. “The ice flew and shattered, but the can was merely dented, while we heard the laughter of a fat lady, high over head and echoing down and own and own the tundra.” Ted and his companions find canned food but they do not have methods or tools to open them. AM know this fact at the beginning and just watch what they are doing as a joke rather than stop them. To me, Harlan may suggest to readers that supercomputer which human created before may finally hurt human

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