When she asks questions, they dismiss her and refuse to relay their stories to her. However, whenever she approaches, they stop their chatter. Indeed, they are often talking and laughing amongst themselves. When the narrator is roughly 15 or 16 years old, she begins to realize that the other women know things that she does not. Although they are fed, allowed to wash and converse, and given mattresses to sleep on, they have no other comforts or freedoms. They are constantly watched by a set of perpetually rotating guards. In the cage, the women have no understanding of why they are being held captive. Because she is so young, the other women guess she was grouped with them by mistake. When the narrator is a child, she is ripped from her home and family and imprisoned in a cage underground with 39 other women. The following summary adheres to a more linear mode of explanation and relies upon the present tense. For this reason, she employs both the past and present tenses. The narrator is also writing from a retrospective angle.

Therefore, because the unnamed narrator is unable to explain the reasons for her circumstances, she cannot relay them to the reader. Set in an unidentified dystopian universe, the narrative world remains mysterious to the first person narrator and protagonist throughout. Jacqueline Harpman's novel I Who Have Never Known Men is a work of speculative fiction. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Harpman, Jacqueline.

I who have never known men