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“I Have No Mouth…” takes place entirely beneath the ruined shell of Earth after an apocalypse. The characters wander through all types of settings, though mainly find themselves in enormous corridors made of metal, suggesting the inside of a machine. In a very real sense, they are in the belly of the beast that is slowly digesting them. This space is a deeply unsettling, unnatural place for humans to have to exist. 

As the group sets out to the ice caverns, it is unclear whether any of the environments they travel through, aside from the metal-plated hallways, are real, or some kind of hallucination created by AM. They are at the mercy of AM’s whims and malevolence, with no access to any true natural setting. The narrator mentions a “blistering sun-thing,” suggesting that the machine creates settings that are deliberately inhospitable as a method of further torturing the humans. Other places mentioned in their travels are “the cavern of rats,” “the path of boiling steam,” and the “vale of tears.” These are not places anyone would ever wish to find themselves, let alone be forced to endure in succession. The story’s settings contribute to the atmosphere of despair that enshrouds the characters, and by extension, the reader.

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