Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow can be defined, at one level, as an “unnatural narrative” (Alber 2009) because intradiegetic time (time within the story) moves backwards. Many narratives confront us with retrogressive temporalities (Richardson 2002: 49-50), among which one can mention Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel The Long View (1956), Charles Hubert Sisson’s novel Christopher Homm (1965), Tom Stoppard’s play Artist Descending a Staircase (1972), Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld (1997) and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001). In most of these cases of reversed time the narrative discourse represents a chronological sequence of events in such a way that we gradually move backwards in time, while the individual sections themselves preserve a regular chronology, i.e. they move forward through time. However, in some (more extreme) cases, such as Alejo Carpentier “Viaje a la semilla” (1944), Ilse Aichinger’s...
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Citation: Alber, Jan. "Time's Arrow". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 January 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8356, accessed 13 December 2025.]
