Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991) is a postmodern novel by English novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023). The story is told from the perspective of an undefined entity inhabiting a German-American doctor's body. The entity gains awareness at the moment of the doctor's death and observes the events of the man's life unfold backwards. A highly experimental work, Amis uses the novel to explore the themes of the nature of time and the impact of evil.
The book employs an unconventional narrative structure, telling the story of the protagonist's life in reverse. This innovative narrative technique contributes to the novel's exploration of themes such as morality, identity, and the nature of time itself. Time's Arrow was consequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.
Overview: Time's Arrow |
| Author of Time's Arrow | Martin Amis |
| Published | 1991 |
| Genre | Postmodern, Fantasy fiction, Experimental fiction |
| Summary of Time's Arrow | - The story follows German Holocaust doctor, Tod Friendly, beginning with Friendly's death in America before tracing his life in reverse.
- The reverse narrative serves to disorient the reader and provoke contemplation about the nature of time and morality. As we move back through Friendly's life, we encounter his various identities, relationships, and actions, all leading to his fateful involvement in the Holocaust.
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| List of main characters | Tod Friendly and The Entity. |
| Themes | Time and perspective, morality, and identity. |
| Setting | United States of America at the beginning, and Auschwitz, Poland, towards the end. |
| Analysis | - The reverse chronology of the novel allows Amis to depict the horrors of the Holocaust in a new light, forcing readers to confront the reality of these atrocities in an unfamiliar way. The novel explores the complexities of identity, as we see Tod Friendly's life and character unfold in reverse.
- Additionally, the novel raises questions about the nature of time and history, challenging the idea of linear progression and inviting readers to reflect on how our understanding of the past shapes our present and future.
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Time's Arrow: Summary
Time's Arrow is told from the perspective of an unnamed entity that resides in a man called Tod Friendly. The entity gains awareness at the moment of Tod's death in a hospital bed in the American Northeast. At first, the entity cannot understand what the doctors and nurses are saying. As Tod begins to recover his strength, the narrator realizes that he is watching Tod's life unfold backwards from death to birth.
The novel's title comes from The Reawakening (1965), a book by Primo Levi (1919-1987). Levi was a Jewish-Italian who survived the Nazi concentration camps.
The entity does not have access to its host's thoughts or feelings and remains a passive observer. After learning to translate backward speech, the entity can build a fuller picture of the man's life. Tod is a successful German-American doctor in upstate New York but struggles with a drinking problem and is plagued by nightmares involving infants and doctors. Unable to maintain a close relationship, Tod has several brief affairs but feels bitterly alone.
Fig. 1 - Tod Friendly enjoys a long career as a doctor in small-town America.
As the narrator watches the events of Tod's life unfold in reverse chronological order, he notices that many simple interactions take on a more sinister edge. Instead of acting as a healer, Tod's work often inflicts pain on his patients. The entity becomes concerned that Tod continually blocks out large parts of his past and drinks heavily.
Does Amis establish the entity/narrator as a sympathetic character? Why or why not?
When Tod's friend informs him that the authorities may have learned about his location, he changes his name to John Young and moves from the countryside to New York City. From there, he moves to Portugal shortly after WWII, changing his name to Hamilton de Souza. After a short period in hiding, he returns to Germany at the end of WWII, where he adopts his actual name: Dr. Odilo Unverdorben.
Unverdorben is a doctor at a Nazi concentration camp, working alongside "Uncle Pepi," a stand-in for the infamous Dr. Josef Menegele. While their crimes are horrendous and evil in real-time, from the entity's perspective, Unverdorben's work involves bringing thousands of people to life and sending them out of the concentration camps into comfortable lives.
Fig. 2 - The entity's perspective of time shields him from the dark truth of the doctor's activities at Auschwitz.
Unverdorben has a troubled relationship with his wife, Herta, after the pair loses their young child. After being demoted to a minor camp, Unverdorben is responsible for "creating" people with disabilities. The entity is greatly disappointed at the decline in employment. Unverdorben then becomes an officer in the SS, removing Jewish people from the ghetto to be sent to their more comfortable homes.
As Unverdorben grows younger, how does the entity's view of its host change?
As they grow younger, Unverdorben is back in medical school and deeply in love with his wife. The pair eventually go their separate ways, and Unverdorben returns to adolescence and moves back in with his family. After becoming a baby, Unverdorben re-enters his mother's womb and splits it into an egg and sperm, which the narrator knows is the end of his existence.
Contrast the novel's opening and closing paragraphs. How does the imagery in each relate to the theme of time?
Time's Arrow: Characters
The main characters in Time's Arrow are Tod Friendly (also known as John Young, Hamilton de Souza, and Odilo Unverdorben), and the Narrator.
Tod Friendly/Odilo Unverdorben
Unverdorben serves as the novel's protagonist as the reader learns about his life's events as they unfold backwards. In a linear structure, Unverdorben was born in 1916 in a small town in Germany. While attending medical school, he met his wife, Herta. With the rise of the Nazi party, Unverdorben became an officer in the SS and worked his way up to an experimenter in the concentration camps.
When the Nazis lost the war, Unverdorben fled Germany and smuggled himself through Europe, eventually reaching America, where he settled in upstate New York and assumed the identity of Tod Friendly. Friendly could live the rest of his life as a doctor, free from detection.
Fig. 3 - Auschwitz was the most notorious Nazi concentration camp in Europe.
Unverdorben partakes in many acts of evil. His wife is disgusted by his involvement with the concentration camps, but Unverdorben defends his actions by saying he is exceptionally renowned for his abilities. In German, his surname translates to "unspoiled" or "unpolluted," which reflects the character's origins as a naive young boy. In contrast, in his false identity, the name Tod translates to the German word for death.
The Entity
The entity which inhabits Unverdorben's body acts as the novel's narrator. Unable to control any of its host's actions, the entity is a passive observer of Unverdorben's entire life. The narrator is aware of how time is supposed to operate and is shocked by the reverse flow of everyday events like food consumption and aging.
In the beginning, the narrator sees himself as separate from Unverdorben, as a parasite or ghost in another man's body. At several points, the narrator seems to switch from passive observer to active participant, using "we" rather than "I" to speak about Unverdorben's actions.
The narrator sometimes judges the actions of its host but remains unaware of Unverdorben's crimes. The narrator's perspective allows him to view the doctor's time in Auschwitz as a life-giving period of service. For the first time, the narrator feels connected to the host as gifting life and liberty to the prisoners provides a sense of meaning and pride.
As the entity follows Unverdorben back through his life to the doctor's time at Auschwitz, he encounters what appears to be a kind old man known as "Uncle Pepi." Uncle Pepi's character is based on Dr. Josef Mengele's real-life figure.
Known as the "Angel of Death," Mengele was the head doctor at Auschwitz, the most notorious Nazi concentration camp. As a staunch believer in Nazi ideology, Mengele used his medical talents to investigate ideas of racial purity. In 1934, he joined the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene and quickly climbed up the ladder of the Nazi hierarchy.
Fig. 4 - In 1985, the US Navy confirmed Mengele's final resting place using dental records and skull comparisons.
After serving as a frontline doctor in Russia and France, Mengele was assigned to be a chief doctor at Birkenau, a part of the larger Auschwitz system. His research often involved the cruel torture of inmates, resulting in their slow and painful death. Mengele was particularly interested in conducting experiments with fraternal twins to trace heredity disorders.
When the Nazis were defeated in 1945, Mengele fled Auschwitz and spent four years hiding in the Bavarian countryside before eventually immigrating to Argentina in 1949. For decades, Mengele was one of the most wanted men in the world. He moved from Argentina to Brazil in the 1960s to evade capture. He lived out the rest of his life peacefully under an assumed identity until he died in 1979.
Time's Arrow: Themes
In Time's Arrow, Martin Amis uses a nonlinear timeline to explore themes of morality and perspective.
Time and Perspective
Traditionally, time occurs linearly, meaning actions lead to consequences. In Time's Arrow, Amis reverses this flow, completely transforming the narrator's perspective of events. In the linear sense, Unverdorben is a murderous monster who tortured and killed many thousands of people. However, in the reverse flow, the narrator sees his actions are life-giving; the doctor reverses the effect of death and brings life.
Since the doctor and narrator live life in reverse, all events are predestined and inescapable. Both cannot make a moral choice that will change the outcome of the past they're heading towards. At the end of his life, the narrator finally realizes that he has been flowing in the wrong direction, like an arrow flying feather-first. This perspective alters his understanding and morality of the events of the doctor's life. Amis uses this realization to point out the true horror of history. The events of the Holocaust have occurred and can not be undone by anyone.
Fig. 5 - The flow of time shapes the entity's view of reality and morality.
Amis uses this relationship between time and morality to highlight the mentality of the Nazi doctors who carried out some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. While researching the novel, Amis read The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986) by Robert Jay Lifton. As a psychiatrist, Lifton believed that the Nazi doctors who carried out such inhumane experiments had to undertake a process he called "doubling." They could only commit these acts by compartmentalizing their role as a clinical scientist as a separate identity from their personal life.
In Time's Arrow, Amis represents this doubling effect by having the doctor and the entity be two separate beings sharing one body. Years after the book was published, Amis confirmed in his autobiography, Experience, that the narrator is the repressed soul and conscience of Odilo Unverdorben.
Time's Arrow: Analysis
Time's Arrow is a highly experimental novel that subverts many traditional storytelling formats. The novel is notable for its unique narrative structure and the way it uses this structure to comment on history, morality, and personal identity. This experimentation makes the book a work of postmodernist fiction.
Postmodernism is a literary genre that employs experimentation while avoiding many of the traditional features of literature. Postmodernist works often feature nonlinear narratives, unreliable narrators, and intertextuality. Famous examples of postmodernist novels include Milan Kundera's (1929) The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace (1962-2008).
Amis is known as a critical figure in the postmodernist literary movement. His works often challenge many aspects of traditional literature, and Time's Arrow is considered his most experimental novel. The book contains little dialogue, and the characters' speech is often presented in backward, phonetic text:
Dug. Dug," says the lady in the pharmacy.
"Dug," I join in. "Oo y'rrah?"
"Aid ut oo y'rrah?" (Ch. 1)
The story unfolds in a nonlinear fashion and is told from the perspective of a nontraditional narrator. This point of view can often leave the reader disorientated but highlights the unreliable nature of narration.
Unlike traditional narrators or protagonists, the lead characters in Time's Arrow are powerless to make choices as the events unfold. The narrator has no control over his host's body and little understanding of the meaning of the doctor's actions. While readers expect lead characters who take action or face moral dilemmas, Amis challenges this expectation by presenting morally weak and powerless characters.
Postmodernism critiques established beliefs and systems of thinking. With Time's Arrow, Amis attacks the idea that modernity and progress are inherently good and will solve humanity's ills. At the beginning of the 20th century, many people speculated with a rapidly modernizing society, problems like war and slaughter would become a thing of the past. In Time's Arrow, the Nazi doctors use science and efficiency to perfect the art of killing and can destroy human beings on an industrial scale.
In the beginning, the entity views the doctor's actions as cruel. Since time is reversed, it appears he is inflicting pain rather than healing. However, when the doctor works at Auschwitz, his cruel actions appear kind and benevolent. His actions of murder and torture are reversed into the act of creating life. Amis uses this reversed situation to illustrate the twisted ideology that culminates in events like the Holocaust. The German doctors who participated in mass murder were so convinced by Nazi propaganda that they believed their actions were actually helping humanity.
Time's Arrow: Quotes
Here is a look at some important quotes from Time's Arrow by Martin Amis.
Martin Amis employs a postmodern style to subvert traditional storytelling techniques and investigate the impact of the doctor's actions.
They're always looking forward to going places they're just coming back from or regretting doing things they haven't yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye." - (Ch.2)
The narrator finds himself observing a chaotic world where everything happens in reverse. The novel's reverse chronology is just one of the experimental elements Amis uses to challenge the novel's traditional format and question the reader's expectations.
Time, the human dimension, which makes us everything we are." - (Ch. 3)
From the narrator's perspective, the evil acts committed by Unverdorben become kind deeds. In reverse, taking a life is actually giving the gift of life. The narrator is unable to see the true inhumanity of the doctor's work until the very end.
Time's Arrow - Key takeaways
- Time's Arrow (1991) is a postmodern novel by English novelist Martin Amis.
- The novel's narrator is an undefined entity inhabiting a German-American doctor's body. Unable to control its host, the entity passively observes the events of the man's life unfold backwards.
- The novel deals with the actual historical events of the Holocaust and contains some characters based on real figures.
- Since time unfolds backwards, the entity's view of events is shifted to a positive view of the doctor's actions.
- Amis uses many experimental postmodernist techniques, including a nonlinear timeline and an unreliable narrator.
References
- Fig. 2 - Child Survivors from the USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Child_survivors_of_Auschwitz.jpeg
- Fig. 3 - Auschwitz by RonPorter: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gatehouse_Auschwitz_II_(Birkenau)_-_2.jpg
- Fig.4 - Josef Menegle from Dr. Richard Heimer, BUMED Office of Medical History: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mengele_US_Navy_Medicine_(page_12_crop).jpg
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