SECTION 1 (pp. 74-86)
Focus on: the
title
CONSIDER THE
LOGIC . . .
— Consider for a moment the fallacious
logic of the title: the second statement does not follow from the first. It
only becomes logically correct if reversed: 'Because everything I do heals, I
am a healer.' However, given that the acts of creation and destruction in this
narrative are reversed, and Friendly's role as a doctor is to 'demolish the
human body' (p. 83), the statement in the title takes on a sinister
implication: 'Everything I do is justified by the labels I attach, to myself or
others.' Which twentieth-century regimes used this argument to justify
atrocities?
Focus on:
identity and narrative strategy
CONSIDER AND
LIST ...
— 'Time, the human dimension, which
makes us everything we are' (p. 76). What aspects of a person's life would you
include in the idea of 'everything we are'? Make a list. How many of these things
do we know about Friendly's life? Friendly seems to have spent his time getting
away from what he was, assuming new identities. Played in reverse, does the
narrative of his life promise to lead through the layers of false identities —
Tod Friendly, John Young — to his true identity? Or is the reader required to
adopt an attitude of alert scepticism about every new 'fact' that we learn, in
case this also is false? We cannot measure what we learn against what has
happened so far in the narrative: we must wait to measure it against what is to
come. How does this narrative strategy differ from the usual contract that
exists between a novelist and a reader?
COMPARE .. .
— Compare the way that Time's Arrow
subverts conventions of how fiction sets up identity with the way that other writer's do like Laurent Binet or Harold
Pinter does this in his plays. Consider Birthday Party (1960), for instance,
and examine how the information the audience is given about Stanley's identity
is shifting and contradictory. What is his past? What does he do? Who is he?
And what about Goldberg — what's his real name? Why does he seem to be
continually reinventing himself? Pinter's technique questions the stability of
the very idea of 'identity': it may be convenient for the audience to be told
'who' a character is, but this is a traditional cheat — how can anyone know who
they are beyond borrowing a name, a role, a sense of race or nationality, or a
set of beliefs? Might Amis be making a similar point?
ANALYSE WITH
CLOSE READING ...
— Analyse the techniques that the
narrative employs to create the character of Kreditor.
Focus on:
clues
DECIPHER ...
— The narrative lays down a trail of
clues about Friendly/Young's past
and about why he is on the run. Read carefully through the paragraph on p. 81
that starts ' "The only present danger," Kreditor resumed'. What
clues does the photograph, in the context of the conversation between the two
men, give you about Friendly/Young's past? Consider the hideous inversion of
what hospitals do on pp. 83, and think again of the tide of this chapter.
PART I,
CHAPTER 3
SECTION 2 (pp. 86-103)
Focus on: sex
SUMMARISE ...
— Summarise what the narrative says
about the connection between sex and power in Young's mind.
Focus on:
memory and forgetting
TRACE ...
— The narrator is surprised at the
human capacity to forget (p. 89), but this only happens in reverse time of
course. What hints have there been in the narrative so far that Friendly/Young
finds it hard to forget his own past?
-— If the
narrator remembers the killing of JFK, President John F. Kennedy (p. 90), where
can you place the narrative present at this stage in the novel?
Focus on: the
theme of fear
REFLECT AND
EXPLORE . . .
'Our hilarity
contained terror ... terror of our own fragility. Our own mutilation' (p. 93).
Explore the link between fear and laughter in this section of the novel.
Focus on:
hospitals
ANALYSE ...
— How are hospitals represented in this
section? How does the bizarre perspective of reversed time create surprising
images and ideas about hospitals?
Focus on:
addresser, addressee
COMMENT ...
— 'All three of us know that John has a
secret. Only one of us knows what that secret is' (p. 98). Comment on how the
triangular relationship of narrator-character-reader works in this novel.
Focus on:
parts of the body
COMPARE
CONNOTATIONS OF IMAGES . . .
— What significances do 'heart',
'face', 'throat' and 'eye' have, with reference to the foetuses described on
pp. 101—2? What significances have these images had earlier in Chapter 3, when
referring to the women that Young pursues? Compare these two types of ideas.
Focus on: the
limitations of language
EXPLORE THE
LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE . . .
— What does 'atrocity' mean? What
connotations does it carry that near-synonyms like 'violence', 'cruel act' or
'guilty act' (listed in a thesaurus) do not? Using a thesaurus, try to find a
word that expresses an act of greater evil and cruelty than 'atrocity'. Does
such a word exist in the English language? Can any word ever convey the
extremity of an atrocity? Or is any attempt to label such an event always a
euphemism, an acknowledgement of what it cannot express? Use a search facility
to find references to atrocities in a national newspaper (you might try
http://www.guardian.co.uk or http://www.independent.co.uk or
http://www.the-times.co.uk or http://CNN.com) and measure the events described
against the language used to describe them.
Looking over Chapter 3
QUESTIONS FOR
DISCUSSION OR ESSAYS
1. Discuss the significance of the
human body throughout Chapter 3.
2. How has the theme of power been
developed in Chapter 3?
3. Analyse the idea of 'soul' as it is
presented in Chapter 3.
4. ESSAY QUESTION - 'I keep expecting the world to make
sense. It doesn't. It won't. Ever' (p. 91). How does Time's Arrow explore
irony in Chapter's 1-3?
