By Prakhar Shukla
Humans are finite beings; we tend to perceive time in a linear fashion, as a sequence of the past, present and future, often measured through the changes we observe around ourselves. Days follow nights, weeks roll into months, and our lives unfold in an order that seems fixed. Yet, while we may live within this line of time, our experience of it is often anything but straight.
We remember differently than we live. We group moments by similarity, not by sequence, and we return again and again to the same events, even when years have passed.
Literature has long understood this contradiction. Writers bend and fracture time in their stories, creating structures that feel closer to the workings of memory than to the ticking of a clock. The result is that time in books often mirrors human consciousness itself: layered, cyclical, interrupted, and sometimes haunting. Henri Bergson described this as durée—a lived time where the past is never gone but constantly flows into the present. Marcel Proust dramatised it when a taste of cake reawakened a childhood world—not as a memory filed away, but as a past relived in the now.
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway offers a clear example. The novel takes place over the course of a single day in London, yet through the consciousness of its characters we move freely between decades. Clarissa recalls her youth, Peter his old love, Septimus the horrors of war. The tolling of Big Ben anchors the present, but the characters’ thoughts drift and return unpredictably. Woolf shows us how one moment in the present can be filled with the shadows of many pasts, and how a single day can contain a lifetime.
In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the sense of time is even more fragmented. The first section, narrated by Benjy, collapses past and present into one continuous flow. For Quentin, time presses down like a weight, while Jason treats it as something purely mechanical. The Compson family’s story cannot be told in order because each consciousness experiences time differently. Heidegger reminds us that human life is always “being-in-time”: we do not leave the past behind, but carry it into every moment of the present. Faulkner’s fractured clocks echo this truth.
Other writers show how time itself seems to repeat. Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude shapes Macondo as a place where generations circle back on themselves, repeating names, mistakes, and desires. The past is not gone but alive, echoing through descendants. Toni Morrison’s Beloved works with a similar idea, though in a different register. Sethe’s memories of slavery do not remain buried in the past. They erupt into the present, returning with the force of ghosts. Here Morrison mirrors what trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth have noted: traumatic events are not remembered in order but intrude belatedly, disrupting the flow of time itself.
Perhaps the most striking challenge to linear time comes in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time,” slipping without warning from one moment of his life to another. He experiences his wedding, his captivity during the firebombing of Dresden, and even his abduction by aliens all as part of the same disordered sequence. This randomness reflects how trauma lingers: war veterans do not recall their experiences neatly in order, but are struck by sudden and involuntary returns. Vonnegut’s novel captures the sense that time, especially in the face of suffering, is not a smooth river but a series of jarring interruptions.
These literary experiments feel so familiar because they resonate with how human beings actually live and remember. Time is not only the hours on a clock or the pages on a calendar. Sometimes a single task stretches endlessly, while whole months seem to vanish in hindsight. Years that felt unbearable while we endured them can later appear to have flown by in an instant. We do not tell the story of our lives by reciting each day in order. Instead we remember in clusters and themes: the childhood summers, the difficult year at university, the period of grief, the season of joy.
Writers who fracture time remind us that human life is not best understood as a straight line. Our perception bends and folds, linking what is alike and splitting apart what is not. Memory interrupts the present, and the present constantly reshapes our memory of the past. By breaking away from chronological order, literature reveals something profound about us. We live linearly, but we carry our pasts in ways that resist order. Perhaps time itself is less a line and more a pattern—a constellation of moments that shine differently depending on where we stand.
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