“I’m no fucking plumber!”
Happening“I’m no fucking plumber!” is the young surgeon’s reply when the narrator asks what he is going to do to her. Spoken just before she succumbs to the anesthetic, the dismissive sentence becomes more than an isolated insult: its later recurrence in her account exposes the unequal relations of authority surrounding her treatment.
The remark in the operating room
The narrator recalls being in the operating room and asking the surgeon to explain the procedure. Rather than answer, he shouts, “I’m no fucking plumber!” It is the last thing she hears before the anesthetic takes effect. The exchange leaves her question unanswered at the moment when she is about to lose consciousness, making the sentence a final encounter with the surgeon’s authority rather than an explanation of her care.
A sentence that persists
The narrator returns to the words while recounting the experience. She describes them as one of several ordinary remarks, spoken without apparent thought, that continue to resonate in her mind. Their force, she says, is not reduced by familiarity or by later sociopolitical analysis. The phrase thus marks a memory that remains immediate even as the narrator interprets it.
Social meaning
In the narrator’s later reading, the sentence divides the world between doctors and workers or women who abort, and between those who rule and those who are ruled. She connects its impact to a fleeting violent image associated with the man in the white coat, while insisting that analysis does not cancel the phrase’s force. The remark’s significance lies in this conjunction: a dismissive response in a medical encounter becomes, through recollection, a concise expression of the social hierarchy the narrator experienced.
