While at Auschwitz, the reverse chronology means that he creates life and heals the sick, rather than the opposite. The doctor, Odilo Unverdorben, assists "Uncle Pepi" (modelled on Josef Mengele) in his torture and murder of Jews. (Considering the story forward, he escaped Europe after the war and succeeded in settling in America, with the assistance of a Reverend Nicholas Kreditor who apparently assists war criminals in hiding.) In 1948 he travels (in reverse) to Portugal, from where he makes his way to Auschwitz. Later he changes his identity and moves to New York. He is always fearful of something and does not want to be too conspicuous. The reverse narrative begins in America, where the doctor is first living in retirement and then practicing medicine. Although the narrator accepts all this, he is puzzled and feels that the world does not really make sense. Relationships are portrayed with stormy beginnings that slowly fade into pleasant romances. For example, he simply accepts that people wait for an hour in a physician's waiting room after being examined, although at some points he has doubts about this tradition.
Amis's use of these techniques is aimed to create an unsettling and irrational aura for the reader indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the novel is the narrator's persistent misinterpretation of events. Īmis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, and reverse explanation.
The narrator may alternatively be considered merely a necessary device to narrate a reverse chronology. Some passages may be interpreted as hinting that this narrator may in some way be the conscience, but this is not clear. The narrator is not exactly the protagonist himself but a secondary consciousness apparently living within him, feeling his feelings but with no access to his thoughts and no control over events.
The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse. The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronology. It is notable partly because the events occur in a reverse chronology, with time passing in reverse and the main character becoming younger and younger during the novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.
Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis.
0 kommentar(er)
