NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
The Point of Reversal Martin Amiss seventh novel, Times Arrow, or the Nature of the Offense is filled with echoes from the work of the great Holocaust writer Primo Levi. However from critical point of view, jokers laughing in the dark, poised between parody and bathos, humming with thoughts too deep for tears as well as other literary symbols recall Nabokov and Pynchon. For such writers, technique is discovery, not vain display, and their subjects are profound. In attempting a Holocaust novel, Martin Amis pursues audacious moves both in manner and matter. Amis has long been a ferocious and gifted experimental satirist, but this particular book moves far beyond traditional nihilism and literary dexterity peculiar to the author. Times Arrow is narrated by the soul of a Nazi doctor whom readers see living his life backward - from his recent death in the late 1980 s through a long, respectable medical career in a suburban Boston clinic and a New York City hospital, to life on the run in Portugal and Italy in the late 1940 s, to his years as an Auschwitz physician, burning, gassing and assisting in Mengeles experiments, to his medical training and marriage, to his birth in Solingen in 1917.
Amis utilizes the backward effect not to enhance features of postmodernism to his novel. Following his original thought, Amis separates loyal and conservative narrator from numb, sadistic and stupidly conventional Nazi doctor. Throughout, the narrator is a powerless witness, a passenger or parasite, unable to comprehend what is happening, trying to figure the doctor out from his words, feelings and actions. As an illustration, he has access to his dreams but not his thoughts. Times Arrow is clearly much more than an aesthetic game or a moral-historical lesson. By making the narrator an impotent observer, Amis can avoid moralistic, sentimental and melodramatic psychoanalysis of the Nazi mind.
He has chosen his reverse-action narrative style to dramatize the gap between conventional thought and feeling and the Holocaust. By reversing time and causality, Mr. Amis makes the historical facts as strange as they truly are and leaps over conventional defenses against such facts, thoughts, feelings. Amis concentrates his thoughts not only about the Holocaust, but about its assimilation, that is why the American chapters take up nearly two-thirds of the book. I live, out here, in washing-line and mailbox America, innocuous America, in affable, melting-pot, primary-color, Youre-okay-Im-okay America (Amis 89). This bland world of cliches becomes mysterious and unsettling when time runs backward.
And the often bewildered narrators sensitivity is acute. For example, unlike the doctor, the narrator adores his last lover, an elderly woman: Me, Im head over heels... I dont know whether Im coming or going. The forgiveness offered by her young blue eyes, which peep out in mortal embarrassment from the old sneaker of her face, so puffed, so pinched, so parched. Mmm people! It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people...
We are, it turns out, all jerry-built (Amis 152). Beneath its snappy surface, this compassionate language glows with references to the novels backwards structure and to the violations of body and soul at Auschwitz. Throughout the book there are many such literary details, precise observations, twists of perspective and phrases. However, Levi is, justly, the ultimate model. The center of Times Arrow is a chapter describing the doctor at work in Auschwitz, described in reverse, creating bodies from smoke and fire and calling them to life with poison gas or injections. Referring to one of Levis greatest insights, Amis entitles this chapter Here there is no why.
In Levis Survival in Auschwitz, as readers enter the concentration camp in the second chapter, the historical past tense starts to break down. Time is stopping. Chronological sequence is falling apart. After one or two attempts at conventional past-tense narrative, at asserting a rational order, everything is told in a vivid present tense; the past tense does not resume its familiar dominant role until the end of the next-to-last chapter. The moment when time starts to fall apart has to do with questions of causality, justification, and reason. When the tattooing operation was finished, writes Levi, they shut us in a vacant hut...
Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hands reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle, but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. Warum? I asked him in my poor German. Hier ist kein warum (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove (Amis 142). Through utilized inversion, Amis attempted to penetrate something unspeakable and fundamentally silent, inverted morality of the Nazis.
Bibliography Amis M. Times Arrow. Boston Books, 1993
Free research essays on topics related to: arrow, past tense, conventional, auschwitz, amis
Research essay sample on Nazi Doctor Past Tense Amis
