Short Story: "All You Zombies" by Robert Heinlein

First of all, when I first read this story(and when I started writing this post) I had no idea what the title had to do with the story. The story is about time travel, and it only mentions zombies one time, when he/she(the narrarator) thinks about their ring. But, I looked it up, and I think I might have figured it out, and I am going to attempt to explain it. Everyone in the story is the same person. Jane was delivered to the orphanage as a baby, and no one knew where she came from. As she grew up, she wasn’t very pretty and no one really liked her. When she was a 17 she met a guy and fell in love. He ended up getting her pregnant, and she never saw him again. When she gave birth to her baby, she had to have a C-Section. When she woke up, the doctor told her that she was now a man. She had been born a hermaphrodite, and had both male and female reproductive organs on the inside of her body, but the female ones were mostly in control. Until she got pregnant, which ruined her female system, and the doctors had to perform a sex-change surgery, or else she would die. After a few days in the hospital, the baby is stolen, and Jane suspects that it was the baby’s father. Now a man, Jane becomes a writer of a column in the newspaper, and goes by the name, “the Unmarried Mother”. At the beginning of the story the Unmarried Mother is talking to a bartender, explaining the story of his(her) life. The bartender tells the Unmarried Mother that he knows where to find the man who had gotten him(her) pregnant, and offers basically, to beat him up. The bartender shows the Unmarried Mother his time machine and the travel back to the time just before Jane had gotten pregnant. The bartender lets the Unmarried Mother loose in that time, where he falls in love with a girl(Jane, who is actually him from the past when he was a girl) and gets her pregnant. So basically he impregnated himself from the past, which is really weird. Meanwhile, the bartender travels to the hospital a few days after Jane has given birth. He steals the baby and drops it off at an orphanage in 1945, (the same year Jane was brought there) and no one knew where she had come from, so Jane’s baby whom she was the mother and father of ended up being HER(Jane). So basically when she gave birth, she was giving birth to her mother, her father, herself, and who knows how many other people in the story. The bartender then goes back and picks up the Unmarried Mother just after what he had done with Jane(which is why Jane never saw him again). And says this to him “Now you know who he is—and after you think it over you’ll know who you are… and if you think hard enough, you’ll figure out who the baby is… and who I am.” And then there’s my favorite sentence in the whole story “It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself.” The bartender then drops off the Unmarried Mother at some kind of army base where he lives sometimes. He goes back to his bar, resolves a few things and then goes back to the base. He then thinks about the scar from his C-Section which he had when he was Jane, giving birth to himself and his mother and father. He then looks at his ring; ”The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?”  Meaning that he is the only one there and everyone around him is just a ‘zombie’ of him. Obviously, the word “Zombie” didn’t mean the same as it does now, which explains the title. Then he thinks “You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.” Which means that there is no one else but copies of him in the world. The story end with the sentence; “I miss you dreadfully!” Which leaves you still very, very confused, and still wondering exactly what happened.