This text is an examination of what it means to say "No". Eva Brann considers the different forms "No" takes, such as a resistance of will or as a preventative measure or warning, and argues that to understand something of imagination, memory and time an inquiry should be made into what "No" means.

No, that diminutive but independent vocable, begins its great role early in human life and never loses it. For not only can it head a negative sentence, announcing its judgement, or answer a question, implying its negated content, it can, and mostly does, in the beginning of speech, express an assertion of the resistant will-sometimes just that and nothing more. Eva Brann explores nothingness in the third book of her trilogy, which has treated imagination, time and now naysaying.