The Passage of Time

It is our experience of time passing that defines us as human beings. We perceive ourselves to be moving through time in a continuous forward momentum that carries us from childhood to adulthood, from birth to death and from the past to the present. The past seems to fade away and the future to be coming towards us. It is because we perceive time to be linear that we make plans, set goals and invest in the future. Without the concept of time, there can be no understanding of cause and effect; actions and narrative would cease to have meaning as one event would no longer give rise to another.

However the passage of time often evokes a sense of loss or regret. Undesired outcomes are the source of bitterness and frustration. Charlie Chaplin observed: ‘Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.’ It is only when enough time has passed that we see events for what they are-  individual occurrences in a chain of actions and reactions that stretch into the past and into the future, ad infinitum.

The notion of time has always underpinned literature: writers focus on cause and effect, action and reaction; this is the basis of their craft. Since WWI however, modernist and post-modernist writers have begun to subvert linear perceptions of time. In her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ Virginia Woolf rejected traditional plotlines based on linear models of time, preferring instead to focus on the experience of the present moment.  Though we live only in the present, the human mind moves continually from memories to current sensations and realisations, covering past, present and future in its internal monologue. As the mind is free from the constraints of linear time, so should fiction be, Woolf argued, suggesting writers wishing to fully represent the human experience, must abandon traditional notions of linear time and plot and instead: ‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance’(Woolf 1925).

Below is a list of novels which explore, interrogate and subvert the passage of time and its effect on the identity of individuals are listed below. Pay close attention to how they are structured. Common themes and motifs include memory, clocks, loss, youth and childhood, history and death.

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger Henry has a rare chronological disorder which means that he slips in and out of time. He first meets Clare when he is 28 and she is 20 but she has known him since she was 6. Such confusion characterises their relationship and the gaps, overlaps and distances between them become a universal metaphor for marriage; no matter how intimate their relationship, lovers' experience is always separate.
Style/structure: novel, science fiction, love story, dual narrative, non-linear

The Hours

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

When We Were Orphans

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) Part autobiography, part science fiction, part philosophical treatise, this novel charts the bombing of Dresden in 1944 and its life-long effects on Vonnegut who witnessed it as a German prisoner-of-war. Black humour, time travel, surreal events and pithy reflections on war and human nature combine to create a unique and profound novel.
Style/structure: non-linear prose, three interwoven narratives.
Themes: human nature, war, philosophy, time.

Time's Arrow by Martin Amis (1991) Told in reverse from death to birth, this is the story of a German doctor who lives his life backwards. With bitter irony, Amis inverts the timeline of war time Germany, relating the events of the Holocaust in a way which brings to life the futility and horror of the death camps but imbues them with a bittersweet poignancy that stays in the mind long afterwards.
Style/structure: unreliable narrator, reverse chronology.
Themes: human nature, creation vs destruction, time, history.

The Blind Assassin

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

One Day (2009?)