Short Story: "All You Zombies"

The short story "All You Zombies" is a very interesting story that takes a while to understand what exactly is going. After a long time discussing and looking up the story on Wikipedia I finally get what the story is about. I realized that the story has a lot of science fiction elements in it including intellectual excitement, high adventure, and an ambiguous that leaves you to your imagination. The story has a lot of time travel and would not make any sense or wouldn’t be possible without the fact of a time machine. What I got from the story was that a girl, named Jane, was dropped off at an orphanage when she was little. No one knew where she came from or who her parents were. She grows up and falls in love with a man, who seduces her and makes her pregnant. She goes to the hospital, has the baby, to then find out that she had two sets of organs, men and women. The woman organs were used up from having the baby so the doctors took them out, leaving her to be a man whose name changed to the Unmarried Mother. The baby is then stolen from the hospital and the theft was never found. The Unmarried Mother then grows up to be a bartender. The beginning of the story starts with the bartender talking to the Unmarried Mother. The Unmarried Mother then tells the story of his life and the bartender realizes that it’s his life. The bartender takes the Unmarried Mother back in time to find out who the theft was. The Unmarried Mother then finds Jane and seduces her because you can’t resist seducing yourself. The bartender then goes further in time to steal the baby that Jane has. Then you realize that all the characters in the story are all one person, Jane. Jane grows up to be the Unmarried Mother, and then the bartender. When he reaches the age that he is a bartender, he realizes he must complete the chain, and travel back in time with the Unmarried Mother. At the end of the book, you realize where the title comes from when the bartender thinks “I know where I came from, but where did all you zombies come from?” I think he is referring to he knows where he came from, but where did all of you, who are me, come from? I think that this is saying the only person left in the world is Jane. I find it weird that basically when Jane had the baby, she had her mother, father, and herself at the same time. The last words in the story are, “I miss you dreadfully,” creating an ambiguous ending.