Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream begins with a grotesque imbalance. AM, a supercomputer developed for warfare, has exterminated humanity and preserved five survivors to torture indefinitely. It possesses almost unlimited power over their bodies and surroundings, yet its hatred remains inseparable from its own existence.

The story’s most disturbing idea emerges through Ted, its narrator, whose insistence on his sanity gradually becomes difficult to distinguish from his desperation to retain some control over himself.

AM’s hatred is most striking in its famous speech beginning, “HATE. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you.”

The machine attempts to express its hatred through measurements of its own circuitry. The absurdity lies in the attempt to measure something so consuming. AM possesses an intelligence capable of articulating its resentment with such exactness, yet the speech offers no release from it.

Its hatred can be described at length, but description cannot change the conditions that produced it. I could understand something of AM’s bitterness without feeling any less repulsed by what it does with that bitterness. Its intimate knowledge of suffering has only sharpened its capacity to inflict it.

Ted’s narration is marked by his persistent need to establish himself as more rational than the people trapped alongside him. At first, I took this as an understandable attempt to preserve some sense of self in circumstances that make ordinary self-possession almost impossible. His contempt for his companions gradually made me less willing to accept his account of himself without question. He seems to need the distinction between himself and the others even though they are all trapped in the same situation. When he cannot change what is happening to him, he can still decide what kind of people his companions are and where he stands in relation to them.

I could understand Ted’s need to see himself differently, but I began to wonder how much of that distinction existed only in his own mind. Even when we cannot change a situation, there is a comfort in believing that we at least understand it better than the people around us.

That belief allows us to retain a favourable opinion of ourselves when circumstances offer little else to hold on to. Ted’s judgments may be partly a defence against helplessness, though his narration never gives us enough distance from him to settle on a single explanation. I began to question the way Ted portrayed the others, as well as my own readiness to take his version of himself at face value.

Unlike many familiar representations of suffering, Ellison does not suggest that being made to suffer will necessarily make people kinder. The survivors remain capable of jealousy and hostility towards one another, despite having ample reason to recognise their shared vulnerability. I preferred this to an idealised portrayal in which suffering brings out everyone’s better nature. Their circumstances do not erase their faults, and their victimhood does not make every action they take admirable.

Still, I wanted more from them as individuals. Their hostility gives the group a sense of realism, but I found it difficult to see beyond their immediate responses to AM and to one another. The story tells us a great deal about what these people can be made to endure, but less about who they were before their suffering became the defining fact of their lives. The relentlessness is deliberate and often effective, but it eventually wore on me. I understood the prisoners’ predicament long before I felt I knew them.

The ending changed how we interpret Ted’s thoughts up to that point. He makes a final choice believing he can still exercise some control over what happens to him and the others. AM retaliates by stripping him of even that possibility, leaving him conscious and able to experience his suffering but unable to speak or act as he once did.

Ted’s narration has been our only access to the world AM has made, with all its fear, resentment and desperate attempts at interpretation. Having followed his thoughts throughout the story, we are left to consider what remains when he can no longer express them. The title takes on a different weight here, bringing Ted’s suffering and his inability to give it a voice into the same image.

I have reservations about how often Ellison relies on escalating brutality, and I wish the survivors had been given more room to become distinct from the things done to them. Still, Ted’s fate gives the story a final force that its relentless violence alone could not achieve. He understands what has happened to him, yet nothing he might think or realise can change it. The title’s last word, scream, comes to feel less like an expression of pain than the terrible possibility of pain that has nowhere to go.