"There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer"
About this Quote
A four-step tantrum disguised as a koan, Stein’s line performs the very modern trick of turning frustration into a kind of clarity. The phrasing is plainspoken, even anti-literary: “ain’t” thrums with refusal, a deliberate drop from high culture into the vernacular. That’s not Stein slumming; it’s strategy. She’s puncturing the reader’s expectation that language exists to deliver tidy meanings, moral conclusions, or final explanations.
The repetition works like a tightening spiral. “There ain’t no answer” states a lack. “There ain’t gonna be any answer” widens it into the future. “There never has been an answer” retrofits the past. By the time she lands on “That’s the answer,” the sentence flips from complaint to doctrine: the absence is the point. It’s a negation that insists on being heard as a completion.
Subtextually, this is Stein’s whole project in miniature. As a modernist (and a writer deeply shaped by early 20th-century rupture: war, psychoanalysis, the breakdown of inherited forms), she treats certainty as an outdated aesthetic. Meaning isn’t a buried treasure you dig up; it’s a thing that happens, or fails to happen, in the act of reading.
The intent isn’t nihilism so much as a bracing de-romanticization of interpretation. Stein dares you to stop treating art like a vending machine for “the message.” The punchline is that the human craving for an answer is itself the mechanism being exposed: when you demand closure, you’re already in the trap she’s built, and the click of the trap is the final sentence.
The repetition works like a tightening spiral. “There ain’t no answer” states a lack. “There ain’t gonna be any answer” widens it into the future. “There never has been an answer” retrofits the past. By the time she lands on “That’s the answer,” the sentence flips from complaint to doctrine: the absence is the point. It’s a negation that insists on being heard as a completion.
Subtextually, this is Stein’s whole project in miniature. As a modernist (and a writer deeply shaped by early 20th-century rupture: war, psychoanalysis, the breakdown of inherited forms), she treats certainty as an outdated aesthetic. Meaning isn’t a buried treasure you dig up; it’s a thing that happens, or fails to happen, in the act of reading.
The intent isn’t nihilism so much as a bracing de-romanticization of interpretation. Stein dares you to stop treating art like a vending machine for “the message.” The punchline is that the human craving for an answer is itself the mechanism being exposed: when you demand closure, you’re already in the trap she’s built, and the click of the trap is the final sentence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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