The Command to Be Fruitful and Multiply

The Command to Be Fruitful and Multiply is presented as more than a biblical injunction: it is a powerful ideal that shapes how reproduction is understood even when bodies, medicine, and everyday life fail to conform to it. The Narrator sets the command against infertility treatment and the demands of motherhood, revealing a gap between the promise that life should multiply and the difficult, often isolating work of bringing up a child.

The biblical injunction and modern reproduction

The Narrator invokes the command through the story of creation: after creating heaven and earth, God creates man and woman and blesses them with the instruction to reproduce and fill the earth. The passage places this ancient assurance beside artificial insemination and fertility medication, which the command itself does not address. Its certainty offers no vocabulary for the medical interventions or uncertainty involved in trying to conceive.

That mismatch becomes especially sharp against the prospect of infertility. The Narrator describes how other people offer simplistic advice to those struggling to conceive, while couples must console one another and face the possibility that treatment will not succeed. Even leading clinics, she notes, can guarantee only a ninety-percent success rate, leaving one in ten people hoping to gestate and give birth unable to do so. The command’s confident imperative thus coexists with a real possibility of unfulfilled desire.

Reproduction as duty and pressure

The command also sits within competing accounts of reproduction. The Narrator sets the religious instruction to multiply against Thomas Malthus’s warning that population growth might outstrip the means of subsistence. Read against that demographic argument, the command seems to promise abundance while the material question of how to sustain new lives remains unresolved. The Narrator further points to the contradiction between religious condemnation of infanticide and arguments that treat children as mouths to feed, exposing the unequal pressures surrounding the decision to have and raise children.

For couples, the expectation to reproduce can intensify private distress. The Narrator describes infertility as a possible source of shame and insecurity within a relationship: a man may experience damage to his self-esteem, while a woman may fear that her partner will leave her for someone more fertile. She connects this fear to societies that have treated infertility as justification for abandoning a woman or taking a concubine. The command therefore does not operate only as a promise of family; it can become a standard against which people measure themselves and one another.

The command against the experience of motherhood

The Narrator’s own pregnancy initially brings uncertainty and resentment toward Niclas, whom she briefly blames for the pregnancy. She knows that he wants to be a father and is already interested in the practical objects associated with a child’s future. After several hesitant days, she accepts the responsibility and begins to desire the baby. The shift does not make motherhood simple: it shows how the ideal of welcoming new life can coexist with hesitation before that life becomes wanted.

After the birth, the identity of mother begins to overwhelm the Narrator’s other identities. Months of broken sleep, repeated visits to monitor the newborn’s weight, and close attention to bodily symptoms and waste leave her feeling that her former selves have been exiled. When she goes out alone, she feels incomplete, as though others cannot understand her without seeing the child. Even attempts to take a solitary walk fail to free her from the baby’s presence in her consciousness. The command to multiply may celebrate the arrival of children, but it does not describe this transformation of a mother’s sense of self.

The work that follows is not only exhausting but monotonous. The Narrator emphasizes the long, grey hours of feeding, changing nappies, trying to settle a crying baby, and checking whether the baby is breathing after falling asleep. This continuous care isolates her and occupies the day while time appears to proceed normally for everyone else. The contrast challenges a culture that calls self-sacrifice desirable or revolutionary while assigning little social value to the labor through which a child is cared for.

Care, writing, and the limits of the ideal

The Narrator’s attachment to her son Erik makes the contradiction more intimate. When she arrives at nursery, Erik notices her, crawls toward her, and reaches out to be held. She recognizes the vivid physical closeness of those reunions and wonders whether such contact with life might eventually become visible in her writing. Yet she is not certain that the experience will translate into art, or that she can enjoy motherhood as fully as she believes she ought to. The command’s affirmation of life does not resolve the conflict between loving a child, longing for time apart, and trying to remain a writer.

Across these reflections, the command’s force lies partly in what it leaves unsaid. It blesses reproduction but does not account for infertility, medical intervention, ambivalence, boredom, or the disappearance of other identities into care. The Narrator’s account does not reject the value of children or the attachment between parent and child; instead, it refuses to let the imperative to multiply stand in for the complicated realities of conception and motherhood.