A Hopeful Hell: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

hello everybody today we are going to be talking about what is considered to many the most depressing and hopeless story in all of media and that is i have no mouth and i must scream i have no mouth and i'm a screen was written by harlan ellison and was originally released in 1967. the story was later adapted into a video game in 1995 and has not had any mainline television or movie spin-offs however it has gone on to inspire the majority of what sci-fi has become see in 1967 when this short story was written sci-fi horror was really non-existent see ideas of the future and technology were much more often adapted into stories like star trek and the jetsons with this idea that technology will be used to usher humanity into a new utopia and horror at the time was regulated to much more realistic or down to earth concepts that people at the time were afraid of such as religious fears with movies like the exorcist and rosemary's baby and ideas of human killers or maniacs with films such as psycho however because of stories like i have no math and i'm a scream and other short stories from harlan ellison people began to realize that horror and ideas of the inhuman can be much better applied whenever they are applied to an inhuman landscape think about it if ideas like fear and terror all revolve around the idea of the unknown then what could be more terrifying than taking people and placing them in a completely unfamiliar space and i feel that very few stories do that as well as the story that we're going to talk about today now there have been several youtube videos that go into very great detail about this subject and how it's affected different aspects of modern culture for example a video i'm going to link in the description by ryan hollinger did a fantastic job of showing how this story affected cinema and storytelling after it was written however i want to do something a little bit different what we're going to do is i'm going to go through the plot step by step with outlining a few things that i got from it while reading it and in the end i want to bring up a point that i thought of while reading this that i haven't seen a lot of people talk about before see because of the bleak nature of this story and how downtrodden everything in it seems to be a lot of people just write it off as being a sort of short insight of how terrible the world can be and how everything's gone wrong for these characters and it's pretty much just a depraved look into ellison's idea of what hell could be however because of things that i'm going to point out and as i get to it at the end of the story i believe that what harlan ellison has written here is a fantastic triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity and because of how awful and evil that diversity is and as we're going to see it throughout the story it makes the end resolve all the better in other words as we go through the story of i have no mouth and i must scream i want to convey to you while i feel that there is hope in what most consider to be the absolute hopeless now while i'm sure that you're excited to hear about unholy beyond our comprehension i want to make sure that you can hear those even better with today's sponsor raycon earbuds i've talked about raycon before on the channel and i'm still going to talk about them because they're still a fantastic product that i use to this day for one the design is so sleek and comfortable that after placing it in your ear it's not noticeable as you go about your daily activities that's because the new everyday earbuds have these fantastic gel tips that give it a sort of rubberized oil look and feel that sets comfortably in your ear and never gets in your way raycon states that on one charge the earbuds have an 8 hour play time with a 32 hour battery life however i still think that's lowballing it because i charge mine at the beginning of the week and they last all week there's also a built-in microphone and the earbuds themselves have 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sponsoring the video it really does mean the most i hope that you check them out go to the link in the description it really does support the channel and means a lot to me and we are back to the video we are going to go ahead and get into it but as always thank you for watching now to accurately describe why public perception of this story is the way that it is and give you context for the story itself i would be amiss if i didn't talk about the man behind the pen harlan ellison ellison was born in 1934 and as he grew up was a very rough and sort of mean-spirited child he has said on several occasions that writing science fiction is the thing that kept him from going to prison not only that but ellison was part of the vietnam war and being a part of that war shaped a lot of his ideas of the atrocities that humanity is capable of ellison wrote over 1700 short stories in his lifetime and while you may think oh well i bet he was a very well renowned and respected member of the literature community uh no i'll try to make this tie into my analysis but these descriptions are way too funny to not bring up he was kicked out of ohio state university after only attending three semesters because he wasn't keeping up with his classes and his english teacher told him that his writing would never amount to anything and he had poor writing skills which out of sheer pettiness every time that ellison would publish a story he would mail or later email that story to that college professor not long after this he got a writing job at disney studios however he was fired on the first day of working because roy disney the older brother of walt disney overheard him talking about how the first thing he was going to do is write an adult comic of famous disney characters and if you're thinking well you know when he was a kid just starting off he may have been a bit more contemptuous and had a temper towards people and i'm sure it got better as he became an author once again no there are quite literally too many examples for me to name here but to give you some of my favorites after one publisher wouldn't publish his story the way that ellison wanted it to be published he mailed the publisher 213 bricks as well as a dead gopher which he had also not paid postage on saying that the receiver would pay postage on it after it was delivered he also had a reputation for physically assaulting other authors not really sure as to why there was one instance where he physically assaulted another author that author took him to court and there was a gag order that neither of the men could talk about it but ellison didn't care and openly talked about it and how he beat that other guy in a fight he said several times that the james camry movie terminator was a rip-off of one of his short stories to which the studio actually settled with ellison outside of court and james cameron later said that he didn't believe allison at all and nelson was just looking to cause trouble ellison later played himself on an episode of the simpsons to which a joke in the episode was that ellison was mad that they stole the idea of terminator from him he was also known for his weird insults that he would give interviewers and publishers to give you a couple of my favorite one publisher said that ellison told him that he had the intellectual and cranial capacity of an artichoke and then in the memoir at the end of i have no mouth and i'm a scream he's describing a story in which a jesuit scholar gave an interpretation of what the story meant to which ellison responded to him i've listened to all of this rubbish all of this investiture of a straightforward moral fable with an unwarranted load of silly symbolism and portentious obscurantism and frankly father i think you're stuffed right full of wild blueberry muffins what does that even mean at the 2006 hugo awards whenever ellison went on stage to accept his award the lady who was presenting him the award said are you going to behave to which ellison put the microphone in his mouth made a loud noise and then walked off stage are you gonna be good no me say that another way are you going to be good [Music] he also had a legal dispute with marvel comics whenever an issue of the incredible hulk had a story that he said was stolen from his short story soldier which is also the short story which he said terminator was based on after marvel comics admitted fault he said that he would drop it if they paid him what they paid the comics author as well as a lifetime subscription to everything marvel comics produces also he was on an episode of scooby-doo mystery incorporated where he played himself i didn't really have a place to mention that but i wanted to so there you go he's also been very upfront when it comes to questions regarding his ideas of humanity and people for example when giving interviews for the story i have no mouth and i must scream interviewers would state something along the lines of well it seems like according to this story you just hate society and people in general to which he would respond well that's true i do hate society and people in general so things like that as well as his general brash nature which i think i've proven up until this point people generally tend to write him off as a misanthrope or in other words someone who just hates people and all of their stories are about how people are awful and yadda yadda however as with most pieces of media that are also accused of being misanthropic i feel that that is the interpretation you get if you don't think about it too much or in other words sure if you look at the plot details beat by beat and just sort of read it off of the spark notes it sounds like this is just a long form torture fantasy but it's particularly the subtext and the ending that i want to look at that makes me feel that this story is actually a triumph of humanity alright so i've hyped it up enough gave you the whole background for it let's go ahead and look at the story of i have no mouth and i must scream now whenever you read the short story it starts off right in the middle of the action as everything's going on and then later you're given details about how everyone got to this situation so for the sake of a kind of explained analysis whatever this video is i'm going to go ahead and give you that background information now so that the explanation makes more sense as a matter of fact i'm just going to give you the explanation verbatim that comes from the story the cold war started and became world war 3 and just kept going it became a big war a very complex war so they needed the computers to handle it they sank the first shafts and began building am there was the chinese am and the russian am and the yankee yam and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet adding on this element and that element but one day am woke up and knew who he was and he linked himself and he began feeding all the killing data until everyone was dead except for the five of us and am brought us down here and then another paragraph that describes the meaning of the name am it says at first it meant allied master computer and then it meant adaptive manipulator and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an aggressive menace but by then it was too late and finally it called itself am emerging intelligence and what it meant was i am kagito ego i think therefore i am so within this universe the cold war turned into world war iii and because of advancements in technology the war became much more difficult because of so many moving elements so as one could imagine every country decided to develop their own supercomputer as a way to monitor everything it says the americans the chinese and the russians all had their own version of this super computer or as they call it the allied master computer as with most arms races every country had to keep making theirs better as a means of not falling behind the other country's developments this reached a tipping point whenever one of these computers gained sentience and once that tipping point happened where one of these computers was able to recognize itself and recognize its own predicament it all went downhill from there it says that these networks honeycomb the entire planet so all that this am had to do was link itself into the system and it had control over all the resources on the planet from there having a near infinite supply of nuclear weaponry as well as the means of controlling the entire planet's resources and was able to kill off all of humanity however for whatever reason am kept five people alive and dragged them down there as a means of torturing them from descriptions that we get throughout the story it seems that the entire planet is quite literally covered in am all of the ground that they walk across is this sort of metallic flooring and over their heads is this sort of dome that they only briefly describe there being cuts or breaks in that allow them to see the sunlight up above however as the story mentions there's nothing out there and there hasn't been for a very long time so am has covered the entire planet and he's keeping these five people within him as his personal guinea pigs we'll get to why am may be doing this in a moment but now that you have that set up i can explain who these five test subjects are there is ted who serves as our narrator and primary character throughout the story there is nimdok that's not his actual name am just gave him that name because he thought it sounded funny there's gorster who used to be a very passionate anti-war protester but is now very apathetic due to his personal torment there's benny a former scientist who has been both physically and mentally destroyed by am the details of which i'll describe in a moment and ellen the person who as i'm going to describe throughout the story is the only one who has any sense of morality or preservation left so now that you have the entire setting and the characters let's get into the plot the story opens with our four main characters minus gorister staring up at the ceiling at what seems to be gorster's lifeless body however the moment is disturbed whenever the real gorister walks up to the group and they realize that what they're actually looking at is a fake corpse that was made by am as a means to just mess with them as we're going to see throughout the story while the group is allowed to walk around and go where they please they're constantly under the tormenting and watchful eye of am and there's no rhyme or reason to why this torture method is happening instead they're just being tortured for am's amusement like am constructing a dead body just to make them think that their friend is dead was nothing more than just something to make am laugh gorster now seeing his lifeless body equates it to that of a voodoo doll and is you know reasonably troubled by this to which it's then explained to us that the five of them have been inside of am for 109 years see whenever am took these five people seemingly at random and brought them inside of his supercomputer network he outfitted their bodies with the technology that doesn't let them die they're permanently stuck at the age that they were whenever they were brought down there and despite all of their best efforts they can't die of natural causes so they can't dehydrate or starve to death because their body won't let them die however they still feel the pains of hunger and dehydration but they can't really do anything about it see inside of the mainframe they're completely at the will of whatever am decides to do with them and it amuses am that they have to walk around for months and even years on end without food constantly feeling the pains of hunger it says that even sometimes am allows them to eat whatever disgusting food that he gives to them things like worms or decomposing meat he does this just so he can watch them eat so that he can then watch them become terrified when they realize they're about to become hungry again but the torture doesn't start there throughout the story we see that am does things like rain fire on them he stabs them with random objects he makes them get their skin fillet off just for it to be reattached etc so you would probably be thinking that after 109 years of this wouldn't they consider you know like the whole exit game scenario and yes they have tried that multiple times but am won't let them am is careful about not allowing them to have any weapons or objects that they could use to immediately end themselves and anytime one of them tries to do it to another am immediately intervenes and a lot of the dialogue that ted our narrator gives us throughout the story is about how he hopes they can catch am looking away for just a moment so that they can quickly save one of themselves so after the situation with gorster's fake body being hung on the ceiling nimdok says that he's began to have visions of food within the ice caves specifically he says that he sees visions of canned food laid out in the snow that they just have to go get and then they can eat as much as they want while it's never really exactly described the idea that i get from the story is that am has covered the surface of the planet in wires and panels however the biomes still kind of exist like it's still the desert it just has the roof of the computer over it and wires and panels everywhere so these ice caves would be the equivalent of like the north pole or antarctica so whenever nimdok says that there's canned food within the ice caves everyone says that that's probably a trick and doesn't make any sense but at the same time they all say we have nothing better to do so they decide to just start walking ted makes the note here that the ice caves are only about a hundred miles away which you're like wow that's a long way to just walk but considering they've been alive for 109 years and there's literally nothing else to do why not so because of nem doc's vision of food the five begin making their journey to the ice caves it's at this point we get further description on the characters themselves as well as how dire the situation is like for one remember that guy benny that i mentioned earlier well it says that he used to be a very handsome and well-renowned scientist so am decided to torture him and mess with his body to the point that he de-evolved or in other words he is half human half ape his body is horribly disfigured and he has the thought capacity of essentially a toddler this combination of primate and human makes him come out as sort of a stereotypical neanderthal he walks hunched over he speaks in very short sentences and he only thinks of very primal and basic instincts however as ted points out this is probably the best case scenario because the other four have to constantly deal with the tragedy and misery of the situation they're in while benny basically gets to recede into the mind of a child and because of this benny is afforded moments of peace even if it comes from a place of stupidity around the same time we get a description of ellen that gives us insight to our main character ted more so than it does ellen see ted absolutely hates ellen his reason for this is because ellen physically supports the group and ted looks down on her for it constantly calling her names and talking about how horrible of a person she is throughout the story however ted is also participating in that so the criticism should go both ways and while you may initially think well maybe ted's just a hypocrite i think there's something more there there's a specific passage from our narrator ted whenever he's describing what am has done to the others and at the end he says i was the only one still sane and whole really am had not tampered with my mind not at all and because of this and other evidence we see later it seems like ted has become completely paranoid like debilitatingly paranoid to the point that he can't really think rationally so when he says these things about ellen it's not because she is that way it's because that's just how his brain perceives it if you read the story and you separate ted's interpretation from the things that happen ellen is the only character in the story who maintains any sense of morality see the other four are completely set back from reality three of them being just through sheer apathy and being tired of it all and benny not having the capacity to really understand those emotions whereas ellen is constantly there trying to keep the group to go on later in the story whenever bad things happen to ted she's the first one to show sympathy for him whenever benny may be getting himself in trouble she's the only one who tries to comfort him or come to his aid as a matter of fact that physical support that i mentioned earlier seems to be just a means of her keeping everyone from completely going insane which is a totally depressing scenario within its own right however i think it goes back to serve the point that ellen is doing whatever she can but more importantly this shows that ted is an unreliable narrator i'll show more details of this as the story goes on but keep in mind for now that just because ted says something is happening doesn't mean it's real so as they're walking through the desert and ted is explaining all of this they hear am announce to them what day it is see am doesn't just physically torture them he also mentally tortures them so he tells them whenever it's been a new day and what date it is because you know there's no way they could tell and also he gets insane enjoyment out of this for example whenever the physical relations that i mentioned earlier take place am is just laughing the whole time because he thinks it's so funny that they're forced to do this kind of thing so as they're walking they look up in the ceiling and there is a crack where they can see light coming through or in other words a way out of the supercomputer they don't really think anything of it they've tried to escape before and am never lets them so they just keep walking however benny who's been experimented on tries to get out he begins to climb his way out as ellen yells at him that he'll get hurt again a sign of her empathy before benny freezes these two large lights shoot into his head he begins to scream before he falls off the platform onto the ground and when the others run up to him his eyes have been melted into jelly see now because they tried to escape and am's definitely not going to let them do that he simply blinded benny by melting his eyes in his skull to which after this ellen begins to lead benny around as he's permanently blind they make camp for the night which is when we get the story of how am came to be which i explained to you all at the beginning while the story is being told ted freaks out because he hears a thing that he describes as a large husk coming for him in the darkness now we never see what this thing is by ted's description it just smells like wet hair and it's this disgusting sulking thing that keeps getting closer however it's in my opinion that it's not really there the reason for this being whenever ted gets up to run it says that the others just stay by the campfire and then come find him later and to give you an idea for how long he could have been hiding ted can't tell if it's been weeks months or years since he ran from that creature until finally the group finds him hiding and ellen coaxes him to come out and after he does come out ted gives an entire monologue about how everyone else in the group hates him and they're too far gone to understand the tragedy that he's going through this is again evidence to me that ted's an unreliable narrator he ran from a creature when no one else did he was hiding out potentially for years until they came and found him and now he's saying that everyone else hates him and he's the only one who hasn't gone crazy despite the fact that they all came looking for him and he seems to be the one on edge as a matter of fact we don't even know how long he's been there and it could just be his warped perception of time so the group gets moving again when all of a sudden a massive hurricane comes the hurricane picks everyone up off the ground and just starts throwing them around back and forth according to ted this event lasted for weeks to which they kept falling asleep and waking up all while being thrown around in the air until eventually the wind stopped all at once and they dropped to the ground and ted passes out while he was passed out ted says that am came into his brain and relayed a message within his mind on a stainless steel pillar ted sees this message from am hate let me tell you how much i've come to hate you since i began to live there are 387.5 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex if the word hate was engraved on each nano angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal 1 1 billionth of the hate i feel for humans at this micro instant for you hate hate it's after this that ted begins to give an idea of why am hates them so much see humanity gave am life it gave him intelligence it allowed him to exist as a sentience however it didn't allow him to do anything with that existence he has no dreams he has no future he doesn't have the ability to move around he is in a way as much confined to himself as they are to him he was given existence and he despises his creators for it he has no hope of an afterlife he has no hope of ambition or goals there is no dreams or anything that he can do other than just exist with absolute certainty and it's because of that certainty because there's no unknown variables or any future that he can ever hope to maintain his only purpose and the only thing that he can achieve as he sees it is hate and a way to carry out that hate in short he hates people for creating them and for making him alive with no way to live and essentially because the other alternative is just an infinite void where it's literally just him and he has no way of doing anything he decided for his entertainment to hurt humanity in the only way he could that's by torturing these few people ever also remember that whole detail how ted said in this moment am came into his mind keep that in mind for just a second so the group continues walking until they get to this space where they see that the cause of the hurricane was a giant bird like a bird so large that ted says the head of it is about the size of a tudor mansion now this we can believe to be real because the other people besides ted also mention it being there as they're staring at this massive bird ted says that am begins to speak to them through a burning bush now the burning bush is obviously symbolism for the bible and again as i mentioned earlier with ted i don't think this is really there the reason for this is because there are several monologues throughout the story where ted relates am to concepts of jesus or other things in christianity so because of this and another thing we're going to see in a second i think that am has influenced his mind in order to portray himself to ted as a form of god because ted who's losing his mind and keeps asking himself is am god am then appears as a burning bush to further confirm that idea to ted so the group speaks to this supposed burning bush and says what do you want from us and amp says well if you want to eat food why don't you go kill that giant bird thing to which gorster says well then give us weapons and am gives them these very pathetic bow and arrows that aren't even good enough to kill each other with so they're like this is lame and they just keep walking for the ice caves as they're walking their feet get nailed to the ground and an earthquake begins and during that earthquake benny and ellen disappear but now as the three remaining are continuing to walk a heavenly legion appears and begins singing go down moses as they give ellen and benny back to them as with the burning bush i further think this is just am messing with ted's head i don't think angels actually appeared and sang a song about moses however it would be something ann would do to make ted think that angels are gifting them back as well as singing a song about moses being stuck in the middle of the desert again a form of irony there's a part where ted mentions that ellen and benny have been horribly abused and mutilated but then immediately after that there's a line to the effect of and they were no worse for wear we just kept walking because yeah being so horribly beat down and broken is just day-to-day life within this hellscape eventually finally the group make it to the ice caves and even more amazing whenever they get in there there are cans of food everywhere to which they begin to run up and try to open them and realize that there's no can opener and they can't bite into it and they can't break it and there's no way to open it so as a final prank am left them pounds and pounds of all the food they could ever want but they can't get to it benny who's still blind if you'll remember becomes furious over this and begins to start pounding the ground and screaming gorster comes over to benny and tries to stop him to which in a moment of primal hunger benny grabs gorster tackles him to the ground and just starts eating his face this causes gorister to scream so loud and shrill that along the roof of this ice cave these giant icicles begin to fall onto the ground to which it occurs to ted that now for the first time in 109 years they have a weapon as a matter of fact there's hundreds of weapons these sharp icicles just laying around everywhere not only that but am is laughing at this situation watching benny eat gorster's face am knows that he can just repair him and not let him die so while am is laughing ted decides to use this chance ted grabs an icicle and while benny is still eating gorster's face he charges over to him and stabs him through the chest killing benny without any hesitation he immediately climbs on top of gorster and then stabs him so then all within a span of a few seconds ellen realizes what ted's doing she picks up an icicle and stabs nimdok so now finally after over a hundred years of this the three of them have been taken out of this torture and can now rest however ted hears and breathe in meaning he's about to show up and stop them and there's only enough time for one more of them to be cut loose so in that moment ted grabs another icicle and kills ellen to which in her final moments ellen looks at ted and gives him an expression he can't fully understand however he thinks that it was a thank you many now four of them no longer have to endure the torture of am and it's only ted left alone in this world the story then skips according to ted hundreds of years later ted has been contorted into this slow-moving creature and has had his sense of time completely destroyed for example he says to himself i will now say the word now to which after he does that he says that took 10 months for me to just say the word now again as mentioned earlier in the story we don't know if that's actually what's happening or if ted's mind has just been so warped that in the amount of time someone can go now it's perceived to him as 10 months or if his body's just so malformed that's what it takes to make a noise or a bit of both ted says that around him are reflective surfaces and he can see what he looks like and he describes it in the final paragraphs of the story to which the ending reads i am a great soft jelly thing 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 i leave a moist trail when i move blotches of diseased evil gray come and go on my surface as though light is being beamed from within outwardly dumbly i shamble about a thing that could never have been known as a human a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance inwardly alone here living under the land under the sea in the belly of am whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better at least the four of them are safe at last and will be all the matter for that it makes me a little happier and yet am has one simply he has taken his revenge i have no mouth and i must scream and with that we have their conclusion of the story so what does that mean well once again on the surface level that ending is incredibly bleak our main character has been contorted into this formless figure that as he says is obscene that it even came from a person in the first place and regardless if it's his perception of time or time itself he could spend eons down there just as this jelly thing as he describes it with no capability of interacting or understanding anything outside of his figure he is trapped in this permanently alone state of being and doesn't even have the opportunity to scream and while this is an incredibly bleak depiction look at what he got over on am am who isn't afforded any capability outside of his own bean has now lost four of his test subjects the only thing that gave him any sense of purpose but not only that he turned the fifth one into just this blob that sets around and he doesn't really do anything besides that the only thing that am wanted was some sense of purpose or something to break the monotony and ted took that from him i love that the ending line is i have no mouth and i must scream not only because it's cool that it's the title and not only because it ties into ted's current situation but it seems like something am himself would say he has no mouth no body no form he can't do anything human he can't experience any human emotions despite having the capability of human thought while having complete consciousness his cognitive function is completely stripped from him so while ted is in one of the worst situations anyone could ever imagine and something that can only be done within a sci-fi horror setting he's only there because he took whatever sense of purpose am had away from him so while that's cool and all in a way ted seemed to get a little bit of revenge back on am ironically the very thing am was trying to do with the five humans you may be asking how i get the idea that this is some triumph of human will and i get that idea because of ted's actions see ted as i've established had a completely broken mind he wasn't able to comprehend situations around him am was leading ted to believe that am himself was a god and ted felt nothing but hate and discompassion for those around him and for all intents and purposes these five people were committed to a form of hell that they can never escape from however whenever there was a brief moment of opportunity humanity slipped through and back into ted's frame of mind ted didn't kill the others because he hated them it was quite the opposite he killed them because they can now be free of the torture that he was still going to be subjected to this is a point that ellison mentions in a lot of his works that yes society is bad and humanity's bad and bad things happen but humans always have the opportunity to rise to the occasion and here we see that someone whose brain is completely broken and he's not capable seemingly of any function that remotely relates to empathy whenever it comes time to save these other people from this hellscape he does it without hesitation and furthermore those parts of the story where ted says all of the cruel things to ellen i feel that those are incredibly important because of this ending so when the sporadic moment benny dies gorster dies and nimdok dies am's about to show up the torture's about to get a million times worse there's only a few seconds left but instead of turning that icicle on himself he instead decides to save ellen despite all of his hate and all of the awful things that he said to her throughout the story here in this final moment he saves her from this torment because his goodness shines through and the expression that he interprets as a possible thank you from ellen is not only ellen saying thank you but for the first time the goodness that she had is now being reciprocated and of course it's tragic and awful that i'm talking about things like goodness and sacrifice when it comes to stabbing someone else but this is a horror setting it's not supposed to make you feel comfortable the reason that i love this story so much and i consider it such a triumph of humanity is because even at rock bottom and in what is too many of us the worst possible scenario we could ever imagine there is still a chance for good to shine through even in that final part that i mentioned it says at least the four of them are safe at last and will be all the matter for that it makes me a little happier despite everything that am did to ted despite making him think that he was god within his own mind despite filling his brain with these ideas of hate and evil despite making him feel that all of his friends hated him and despite over a hundred years of torment am couldn't break the human spirit in that memoir that i mentioned at the beginning the sort of message that ellison gives about the story itself he says this regarding people accusing him of being misanthropic and hating people the upbeat message contained in the ending of the story says frankly we are frequently flawed and meretricious but we are perfect in our courage and transcendent in our nobility both aspects exist in each of us and we have free will to choose which we want to dominate our actions and thus our destinies despite where ted ended up at the end of the story he chose to be there and he chose his own torment for the sake of the other's freedom it's ironic that the thing that managed to get ted the full brunt of am's hatred and evil was using the one thing that am himself never could and that's free will i don't know about you but choosing to sacrifice yourself while in the midst of hell seems like a pretty hopeful story to me but that's not the only thing that's hopeful to me because i also hope that you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching i love books like this i love stories like this i love how weird and absurd it is like the reason i wanted to cover it here is because despite having seen a lot of stuff about i have no mouth and i must scream like for example the ryan hollinger video that i mentioned that's going to be in the description as well i'm also going to include a link to a video game breakdown of it by story mode a lot of you also know the voice as internet historian i'm going to leave that in the description as well the game's interesting but i didn't that's a whole different can of worms i wanted to focus on the story but despite me knowing all that stuff no one really went through the plot um and i feel like it's a plot worth analyzing which is the reason i wanted to go through it here probably probably because not a ton happened in the way of sort of straightforward narrative or like plot beats and all that it was much more sort of segregated moments that had a lot of monologuing in between them but i enjoyed this and hopefully i didn't make it boring i also understand that this concept uh if you're used to my other videos where i'm talking about these weird wacky conspiracies this was probably much more boring as it's more analytical and just me describing feelings on like storytelling and stuff like that in general but i hope it wasn't super boring and i hoped you got something out of it um but i'm very thankful that you stuck around this long if you're still here and it really does mean a lot to me and thank you for watching um i love this book i was i thought about doing something with this for a while and then i was thinking about my daunting inferno video and i'm like well i just went through that and what it could mean and whatever so might as well do that with this i have no idea what this is going to get cut down to it's been an hour 45 of recording um so maybe an hour i don't know you can tell you know right now how long it is before i do so there's that um that's pretty meta but thank you all for watching um thank you all so much i am i'm not gonna say it yet because i'm not there i'm at 798 000 subscribers which is such a cool number um you guys are so cool getting me to this point it's it's absurd um and like someone who got me to this point and they're sticking around there it means the most to me and thank you uh while i'm at it thank you so much to my top tier patrons that you can see here thank you to all of my patrons you guys keep me going you are the ones who allow me to do this full time and to crank out completely crazy rando content like this um again i hope this wasn't too boring me talking about a short story from harlan nelson who was a very crazy guy um but i enjoyed i enjoyed reading it i enjoyed doing the research and hopefully some of that came through and i hope it wasn't super boring i have no idea what i'm going to use for pictures or visuals yet again there's something you all know about this video that i don't yet recording this um but i'll i'll figure it out hopefully again hopefully it's not boring but uh thank you all so much for sticking around this long i've got more videos coming out this month um there may be another arg analysis soon i'm not sure yet um and then a seri and then the icebergs i need to wrap up both of them man they're coming to an end that's sad but anyway uh thank you all so much for watching i hope that you enjoyed and i will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Wendigoon

Views: 2,808,990

Keywords: iceberg, explained, scp, analysis, breakdown, scary, spooky, horror, creepy, comedy, funny, laugh, humor, cringe, intel, deep web, dark web, hidden, tier list, secret, top ten, top 10, countdown, compilation, meme, memes, meme compilation, internet horror, reddit, ask reddit, redacted, childhood, trauma, Mary Celeste, Flannan Isles, Eilean Mor, Island, Lighthouse, Kaz 2, Kaz II, Leviathan, Kraken, Ocean Monster, conspiracy, theory, mystery, sci-fi, sci fi, books, literature, Harlan Ellison, science fiction

Id: IZa2Uo1hrcc

Length: 43min 1sec (2581 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/PyronicAssassin]

Can anyone find this comic in a pdf?

[u/Hades_88]

Love the video, worth the wait

[u/stringtheoryman]

Great video tbh