I understand the entire timeline of events, but I don’t understand the protagonist’s lamentations at the very end, where he says:
What is your interpretation of this? Does the main character believe he is the only real person who exists in the universe? Why would a headache powder make everyone go away? He then further confuses things by saying
Here he is saying the reader does not exist? Just himself?
What does he miss, if no one else exists? The illusion that other people are real? I don’t understand the whole rationale, I guess… his existence stems from an impossible time-loop paradox, so surely he should be more confused about his own origin, rather than the rest of the world’s. Can anyone make sense of this?
I think the zombies are his past selves. Jane, the UM, the baby and so on that never had a choice in anything. They lurched forward in life only to be used by someone else. The bartender doesn’t take any powder because being alone with your memories is better than being alone. He misses the only person he ever loved which is himself and who is the only person he cannot be with by virtue of the fact that he’d already be him.
Heinlein liked solipsism as a theme (remember the Fair Witness?) and I suspect he believed in it personally, as least to the philosophical extent. We tend to consider those who believe it metaphysically as crazy.
And people who are crazy sometimes refuse medication because it tamps down exactly that part of their mind that is the most interesting.
To us, the notion of a person or thing which is its own origin seems nonsensical… but to the narrator, it’s us who seem nonsensical. We came from our parents, who came from their parents, who came from… who came from what? We’re not really real, we can’t be, because we don’t have any real origin.
Yes, at the end of the story, the unmarried mother has begun to believe that he’s the only person who really exists - because many people he’s encountered in his life turned out to be him after all. The headache powder lets him sleep, but when he’s asleep he’s not conscious, and thus everyone else “goes away” (like the world “goes away” when you close your eyes). He misses everyone that he used to believe were distinct from him, since he feels no sense of companionship from people that are probably just himself.
AYZ is pure, distilled investigation of solipsism. The viewpoint character is the only one who really exists, and sent him/herself through an elaborate causal loop to explore the universe through different viewpoints.
Note, however, that the loop has an exit point, beginning at the moment the oldest self rescues the writer self and sets him on the path to becoming the older self.
It’s a fascinating story in many respects. It’s Heinlein’s last short story, it’s a brilliantly compact examination of the time-travel paradox (with a reversal of the “go back and kill your grandfather” trope), it’s got some outstanding bits of world-building and it’s almost as terrifying as the much older “They.”
He also worked through a list of telling titles for the story that give away his developmental thinking.
I’m not so sure of that; the loop might still be going on - a mission in the narrator’s future might put in him in some other role in his past life: he might turn out to be part of the couple that he worked for as a teenager, or one of the doctors who treated him, or one of the agents that trained him after his recruitment. Every time he passes a baby on the street, he can wonder if in the future, he’ll need to borrow himself in baby form from the orphanage, for a brief appearance in a baby carriage (for some reason).
“When he was Kang Prime he went back in time
He was Hitler and Ghengis Khan
He hid the rockets from your Shogun Warrior
And he left your headlights on”
The loop as we know it is closed and exited. Think of it as a complex loop-de-loop on a Hot Wheels track. Whether there are more loops to come, we don’t know.
He wrote the titles down in order on the first page, apparently as he thought of them during the one day he spent writing the story. They are:
The Egoist
The Solipsist
I’m My Own Grandpaw - real song, BTW, here’s the lyrics. And the back story. The Chicken Or The Egg
You Meet the Damndest People in Clancy’s
It’s All in the Family
Closed Circuit
Plain Jane
The World Snake
Merry Go Round
All You Zombies
Interesting peek into his thought processes, there.
Heinlein also messed up one of the acronyms. Left as a puzzle for the careful reader. (Or you can look here.)
I agree with Chronos. It is not about solipsism, and Jane does not really doubt the existence of other people, but she knows that they are not like her, and she just feels she does not understand them, or where they came from. (And perhaps because they are so unlike her in their origins, she doubts whether they are conscious and aware in the way that she is: hence “zombies”.) She understands (in a sense) her own origins, because she has produced herself out of herself, and has lived through doing that, but she recognizes that other people are different, not produced out of themselves, and she doesn’t ‘get’ where they have ultimately come from (just as, in fact, none of us really “gets” where the universe can have come from, “big bang”, or whatever, notwithstanding).
Pretty hard to square with other points of the story, not to mention Heinlein’s sequence of working titles. You think he started off writing about solipsism (something he did many times, especially the last phase of his career) and changed it to generalized paranoia?
Interestingly, they made a feature film from this short story. I saw it at SXSW this past spring and while I didn’t know anything about its origins from the blurb in the Program Guide, as soon as the directors gave their brief intro and mentioned AYZ, then I knew the big “twist” that the film was leading up to. I don’t think it ever got distribution, even though it featured a name actor, but the film itself was a very fascinating adaptation–obviously padded for time but a tour de force for two actors (one female, one male) who meet, merge, evolve, and twist back on themselves through the film.
I’m going to spoiler the IMDB link in case people don’t want the film revealed, but anyone interested in the story might want to search it out.
I didn’t say anything about paranoia. Where are you getting that form?
I agree the story is about a philosophical issue, and in some respects, about solipsism, but it is saying something rather deeper, more serious, and less jejune issue than “solipsism is (or might be) true”. The deeper issue it is getting at is how it can be the case that solipsism is not true, and of why is there anything at all, and where did it come from. In a sense, the answer for Jane herself is a sort of solipsism, she is self-created, but it is precisely her recognition that this does not work for everybody else that lifts the story beyond triteness.
There is also the fact that Jane’s life, or lives, have largely been horrible. We are being shown the awfulness of solipsism. Fortunately, for most of us, it is not true, but its falsity is, in a sense, and certainly for Jane, incomprehensible.
It’s sort of what your overall analysis points to - that Jane is messed up and afraid of the way s/he feels about other people.
Of course there’s meant to be some resonance with how many of us feel - the idea that we’re special or unique or the only “real” person in a world of shadows is a pretty common thought. Calling it solipsism is just carrying it to a formal level.
There’s never been any question in my mind about what Heinlein was doing in the story - one, he was trying to score the big bux from *Playboy *(who rejected it); two, he was tinkering with some of the very dark ideas of the self you can see in his earliest works (which was then largely set aside for the audiences that paid and didn’t want such disturbing stuff); and three, the story notes boil down to “Solipsism. Go!”
But in the deconstructionist world, you can read any interpretation you like into it and not be provably wrong.
