As I rummaged through my bookshelves yesterday, I came across a book about paradoxes and reread Zeno's paradoxes about motion: Achilles, The Arrow, etc. I couldn't help think of the movie Run, Lola, Run. This led me to think about literature, mostly postmodern, that deals with the absurdity of time. I immediately thought of Beckett's Waiting for Godot and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch.
What are some of your favorite novels and short stories that deal with the absurdity of time?
Isn't "Waiting for Godot" more about absurdity in general, with time playing an important part in portraying, or generating, the absurdity (i.e., "waiting")? "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis fits this pattern of absurdity generated by temporal factors. It asks what would happen if you lived life with time running backwards. This is quite an absurd idea, but it works very well in his hands! Time travel novels, of course, generate a lot of absurd situations. One of the most absurd is "The Time Traveller's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger, where the hero can't control his time travelling and keeps disappearing into the past/future into random locations, often busy streets, and his clothes don't travel with him!
Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button comes to mind. This could be an interesting piece of study; I wish I had some articles on the subject. Toward the end it feels much like a tragedy played forward, but with a life played backwards. The absurdity of the process doesn't seem to detract from the character's inevitable "fall" into youth, infancy, and presumably, nonexistance.
Jorge Luis Borges stories often mess with the concept of time, The Garden of Forking Paths coming first to mind
Yes, this is correct. I am a big fan of existentialism, existential texts, and all around absurdity. Each text that I mentioned deals with time in a different manner. Zeno's paradoxes deal with distance and the absurdity of distance; In Naked Lunch, time -- and as a result narrative -- does not exist, but the text still conveys meaning through all the absurdity; As you stated, Godot deals with waiting -- almost time standing still due to waiting.Originally Posted by mal4mac
Thank you for the other suggestions. They both sound interesting.
Thanks, I didn't think of this. Aside from the movie, which I don't remember if I liked it or not, there is also a graphic novel -- which I haven't checked out yet.
Thank you everyone for the suggestions! It looks like I have plenty of texts to add to my reading list, as if I didn't have enough.
I also thought of the movie Memento.
Keep the suggestions coming please!
In Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy the hero, Billy Prior, suffers from a dual personality disorder, and his "everyday" personality doesn't know what his "other" personality has been doing. In a sense, this results in him "losing" the time in which his other personality is in control. So he jumps from, say, talking to his psychiatrist to having lunch with his girlfriend and there appears to be no time in between. It's like time travel, except he's worried about what his other personality has been up to... His psychiatrist also has an interesting problem - he has problems with *space* in that he has no visual memory due to childhood trauma.
Great speech on time & the absurdity of life - Hotspur's death speech in William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 Act V, Scene 4:
'But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop'
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