We Who Are About To Character Analysis
The race between death and our unique selves, which one will win? Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To… explores the relation between a woman’s prideful, cynical self and the inevitable end she must face, as she and a group of misfits attempt to survive and colonize a habitable but lifeless planet. Yet, on an abandoned planet where no one will find them, tensions rise and a patriarchal presence consumes the crew which results in the violation of our protagonist’s right to her own body and her retaliation that leaves everyone but herself dead. Despite the character’s forlorn nature, she decides to remain alive even after her constant bickering of not fearing death. Thus, Russ comments on the human tendency not to fear death, but its implications,
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by examining the relationship between the narrator’s audacious stand against death and her antithetical dread of it. Within the first few lines of the novel, our narrator already provides the reader a poignant sense of herself, “...
About to die. And so on” (Russ 1). Russ implements such segment fragments from the very beginning to the very end of the novel, each one serving a certain purpose, but most of them stinking the atmosphere with a futile scent. In this specific case, the shortness of the fragments saturates the book with an impersonal coldness. Our protagonist utters such words in a such a swift and icy manner that make her seem as if she’s not averse to death, that there’s no point in delivering a long winded speech demonstrating her fear of the grave. There’s no talk of regrets, no people she she will miss, no people that will miss her; there’s no garrulous, panicked dialogue about how she is not prepared to die, that she hasn’t see enough, experienced enough. She candidly states, “We’re nowhere. We’ll die alone.” For a reader it’s refreshing to hear such words in a your typical ‘crash-landing, survive long enough until help arrives type’ of novel, but the words seem almost non human; perhaps it’s simply logical in her circumstances to accept death, but regardless, to voice said thoughts with such aplomb is inhuman. Facing death as our protagonist does, requires a non human spirit, but with closer reading of the passage, one begins to note that the narrator’s pride hides her unease at the ramifications of
death. When we’re in fear, we all tend to have several defense mechanisms in order to hide the fact that our tail is between our legs. Some of us tend to make jokes, some of us tend to explode and react to divert attention, and some of us tend to speed up and lengthen our speech. Our narrator exhibits the last. As the crash gets closer, as death begins to knock on her door, her speech begins to accelerate. Those terse, frigid sentences disappear and are replaced with longer sentence structures riddled with commas, representative of desperation. Goodbye ship, goodbye crew, goodbye medicine, goodbye books, goodbye freight, goodbye baggage, goodbye computer that could have sent back an instantaneous distress call along the coordinates we came through (provided it had. them, which I doubt) , goodbye plodding laser signal, no faster than other light, you might have reached somewhere, sometime, this time, next time, or never… (Russ 2)
, the narrator rapidly dishes out the loquacious, frenzied discourse into the vocoder, contrasting her previously laconic mutter. The rapid fire repetition of “goodbye” paired with the commas demonstrate the quickening heartbeat of our protagonist, the type of quickening shown when we’re in fear, and in her case the type of fear experienced when death has it’s hand on your shoulder. Through this specific part in the passage, the struggle between her composed, pessimistic conscious self and her natural, ingrained subconscious fear of not death, but of being erased, begins to show through the cracks of her outer self. Often times we read a novel and forget to ask simple, logical questions; we’re too focused on trying to find certain cues or rhetorical devices to ask those sensible questions. Here’s some: why record each uncommon thought into a machine when you’re about to die? To add on to that, why speak your every thought into a machine that no one will ever find? Russ writes the story in a first person perspective in order for the reader to get an insight into the narrator’s thoughts, but she also manages to enforce this contest between the protagonist’s dignified character and her hidden anxiety of being forgotten. Through the vocoder she’s able to represent her tough, misanthropic self she prides herself in; it’s her identity, it’s the way she’s able to express herself without any hindrance. Even when she’s near death towards the end of the novel she continues to muster up the energy to speak into the machine, recording each and every one of her thoughts up until she decides to end her life. She may deny it, but by using the vocoder she was hoping that someone, somehow will find it, will find her, will allow for her to live on in the vocoder, and in a strange sense escape the most humbling essence death, the part she fears most, the part in which she is forgotten. The creative way in which Russ wrote the novel depicts this struggle, and if one continues to read to the end we find that Russ leaves us with an odd ending in this abstract theory of our pride in the desire of living after death. Russ masterfully paints the image of the contradictory disposition of the narrator’s conscious acceptance of death and her hereditary shudder at it. The seemingly never ending contest between the two opponents goes back and forth throughout the novel; at times, the protagonist prepared to give up her life as easily as she takes the lives of her fellow passengers, and at other moments she cannot bring herself to bite the dust. In the end of the novel, at the point of starvation and hallucination, she’s stripped down of her bleak self and eventually continues to take her own life. In this way, Russ leaves us with a thoughtful revelation. The narrator believed that she could outrun death through the vocoder and hence her bold demeanor towards it, yet not even she could hold that behavior constantly and hence her break of character in certain occasion. However, what our narrator doesn’t realize is that by the end of the novel it’s no longer her speaking into the vocoder, but a shell of her former self. Thus, Russ leaves us with the dismal reality that no one can escape death’s grip.
by examining the relationship between the narrator’s audacious stand against death and her antithetical dread of it. Within the first few lines of the novel, our narrator already provides the reader a poignant sense of herself, “...
About to die. And so on” (Russ 1). Russ implements such segment fragments from the very beginning to the very end of the novel, each one serving a certain purpose, but most of them stinking the atmosphere with a futile scent. In this specific case, the shortness of the fragments saturates the book with an impersonal coldness. Our protagonist utters such words in a such a swift and icy manner that make her seem as if she’s not averse to death, that there’s no point in delivering a long winded speech demonstrating her fear of the grave. There’s no talk of regrets, no people she she will miss, no people that will miss her; there’s no garrulous, panicked dialogue about how she is not prepared to die, that she hasn’t see enough, experienced enough. She candidly states, “We’re nowhere. We’ll die alone.” For a reader it’s refreshing to hear such words in a your typical ‘crash-landing, survive long enough until help arrives type’ of novel, but the words seem almost non human; perhaps it’s simply logical in her circumstances to accept death, but regardless, to voice said thoughts with such aplomb is inhuman. Facing death as our protagonist does, requires a non human spirit, but with closer reading of the passage, one begins to note that the narrator’s pride hides her unease at the ramifications of
death. When we’re in fear, we all tend to have several defense mechanisms in order to hide the fact that our tail is between our legs. Some of us tend to make jokes, some of us tend to explode and react to divert attention, and some of us tend to speed up and lengthen our speech. Our narrator exhibits the last. As the crash gets closer, as death begins to knock on her door, her speech begins to accelerate. Those terse, frigid sentences disappear and are replaced with longer sentence structures riddled with commas, representative of desperation. Goodbye ship, goodbye crew, goodbye medicine, goodbye books, goodbye freight, goodbye baggage, goodbye computer that could have sent back an instantaneous distress call along the coordinates we came through (provided it had. them, which I doubt) , goodbye plodding laser signal, no faster than other light, you might have reached somewhere, sometime, this time, next time, or never… (Russ 2)
, the narrator rapidly dishes out the loquacious, frenzied discourse into the vocoder, contrasting her previously laconic mutter. The rapid fire repetition of “goodbye” paired with the commas demonstrate the quickening heartbeat of our protagonist, the type of quickening shown when we’re in fear, and in her case the type of fear experienced when death has it’s hand on your shoulder. Through this specific part in the passage, the struggle between her composed, pessimistic conscious self and her natural, ingrained subconscious fear of not death, but of being erased, begins to show through the cracks of her outer self. Often times we read a novel and forget to ask simple, logical questions; we’re too focused on trying to find certain cues or rhetorical devices to ask those sensible questions. Here’s some: why record each uncommon thought into a machine when you’re about to die? To add on to that, why speak your every thought into a machine that no one will ever find? Russ writes the story in a first person perspective in order for the reader to get an insight into the narrator’s thoughts, but she also manages to enforce this contest between the protagonist’s dignified character and her hidden anxiety of being forgotten. Through the vocoder she’s able to represent her tough, misanthropic self she prides herself in; it’s her identity, it’s the way she’s able to express herself without any hindrance. Even when she’s near death towards the end of the novel she continues to muster up the energy to speak into the machine, recording each and every one of her thoughts up until she decides to end her life. She may deny it, but by using the vocoder she was hoping that someone, somehow will find it, will find her, will allow for her to live on in the vocoder, and in a strange sense escape the most humbling essence death, the part she fears most, the part in which she is forgotten. The creative way in which Russ wrote the novel depicts this struggle, and if one continues to read to the end we find that Russ leaves us with an odd ending in this abstract theory of our pride in the desire of living after death. Russ masterfully paints the image of the contradictory disposition of the narrator’s conscious acceptance of death and her hereditary shudder at it. The seemingly never ending contest between the two opponents goes back and forth throughout the novel; at times, the protagonist prepared to give up her life as easily as she takes the lives of her fellow passengers, and at other moments she cannot bring herself to bite the dust. In the end of the novel, at the point of starvation and hallucination, she’s stripped down of her bleak self and eventually continues to take her own life. In this way, Russ leaves us with a thoughtful revelation. The narrator believed that she could outrun death through the vocoder and hence her bold demeanor towards it, yet not even she could hold that behavior constantly and hence her break of character in certain occasion. However, what our narrator doesn’t realize is that by the end of the novel it’s no longer her speaking into the vocoder, but a shell of her former self. Thus, Russ leaves us with the dismal reality that no one can escape death’s grip.