Time is something humans take for granted every day. Humans often perceive life in chronological order, because the universe tends to head in that direction. But if one takes a step back from the physical world and begins to think, time loses meaning. Sure, the mind technically thinks chronologically, but the ideas it presents are not temporal. When these two concepts meet, when timelessness of the mental world tries to organize the chronology of the physical world, chaos tends to follow. In “Dealing with Time in an Autobiography,” Rebecca A. Demarest explores the relationship between time and writing an autobiography. Demarest pays particular attention to the autobiographical work of two authors: Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov. Connecting the two authors' backgrounds in literature with their autobiographies, Demarest compares the temporal style of both authors. Demarest appeals to the audiences logic, demonstrating how integral time is to an autobiography through factual evidence.
Demarest is highly analytical in her essay, essentially writing how I am trying to write at the moment. Her language is almost robotic in nature, but simultaneously fluid; she masks the impressive literary nature of critical analysis with an expressive nature. Demarest cites quotation from the two author's liberally, organizing and providing evidence for all of her observations. She freely jumps between the styles of Vonnegut and Nabokov, paralleling each point of the authors' use of time. For example, when Demarest contrasts the means both authors use to organize their scattered thoughts, she states that Vonnegut organizes his surreal style by providing actual dates, while Nabokov “jumps from event to event with lines such as 'But let me see. I had an even earlier association with that war.'”
Demarest obviously avoids writing algorithms, such as Shaffer. She organizes her essay by building her concept of the two authors' temporal styles. She introduces the reader to the surreal style of Vonnegut and the slightly less fluid style of Nabokov, and then continues to build on these two styles with more and more detail. Before the end of the article, she includes a few words from other authors on the concept of time in biographies, to provide some outside persepctive. Demarest sums up her essay with a global statement of concerning the effect the authors' were trying to attain with their styles: “Vonnegut uses the Tralfamadorian novel and Nabokov uses what appears to the reader to be an arbitrary recall method, but both serve the purpose of orientating the reader to their lives and helping to build a roadmap of events.“ Both Vonnegut and Nabokov write the way they write to provide a “big picture,” instead of an incoherent series of events. Demarest successfully synthesizes the two different writing styles, connecting them with a common purpose.
From the free flowing tone of the passage, it seems that Demarest studies the temporal styles of Vonnegut and Nabokov because she wants to, not because she needs to. Her writing does not necessarily follow any “rules,” except for a logical order of thought.
Link to article: http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/366/2/dealing-with-time-in-an-autobiography
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