Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
"Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis is a thought-provoking novel that explores the moral complexities of the Holocaust through a unique narrative structure that unfolds in reverse. The protagonist, Dr. Tod T. Friendly, a retired German-American doctor, experiences his life in reverse after a fatal car accident, with the story narrated by a disembodied soul that can only observe. As the narrative retraces Dr. Friendly's unsettling journey back to his earlier life, readers encounter themes of detachment, moral indifference, and the horrific realities of his participation in the atrocities of Auschwitz.
The reverse chronology allows readers to witness the grim transformations of life and death, as victims of the Holocaust seemingly return from death to life, creating a stark juxtaposition against the historical horrors they endured. Amis's innovative approach raises important questions about guilt, complicity, and the reader's role in confronting these moral horrors. While the narrative device has garnered criticism for potentially trivializing history, it distinctly engages readers in a deeper reflection on humanity's capacity for inhumanity. Ultimately, "Time's Arrow" serves as a complex meditation on memory, morality, and the haunting legacy of the past, compelling readers to grapple with the implications of its chilling portrayal of a life devoid of conscience.
Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1991
Type of work: Novel
The Work
To explore the moral horrors of the Nazi Holocaust in a way that would ultimately implicate the reader in a most unnerving immediacy, Amis devised an intricate narrative device in which the narrative is told in reverse, based on the scientific theory, one widely exercised in speculative fiction, that time actually moves backward. The narrative is concise, barely 150 pages, with Amis recognizing the difficulties and demands of such a narrative strategy. To tell the narrative, Amis creates a kind of talking soul that comes into existence at the moment when its host body, a retired German-American doctor in upstate New York named Tod T. Friendly, dies after a car accident. Within this narrative device, this soul acts as a witness-narrator (the voice can only watch and cannot interfere) as Dr. Friendly’s body begins to reengage his life, although this time he lives it backward, moving with furious momentum back to his life as an intern in New York City. At first reading, of course, the reader puzzles (much as the narrator-witness) over the implications of Dr. Friendly’s life: his struggle with alcohol, his dispassionate preoccupation with the human body, his inability to give himself emotionally to his numerous liaisons, and, most disturbing, his grim dreams about babies and children.
The narrator tunes into an inexplicable sense of some ghastly secret that pulls at the events, a secret offense; the book’s subtitle, The Nature of the Offense, is taken from the agonized memoirs of concentration camp survivor and novelist Primo Levi. In deftly handling the intricacies of a reverse narrative, Amis maintains the narrative suspense by developing the sense of foreboding, the sense of imminent revelation, as the doctor boards a ship bound for Spain and from there makes his way through a series of hiding places, even as his German accent becomes more pronounced. In the harrowing sections where the doctor, now known as Odilo Unverdorben, participates in the ghastly experiments and mass killings at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the reverse narrative creates an unsettling experience. Dead bodies in the crematoria return to flesh and walk out of the gas chamber, and the narrative follows as the Jews grow fat in the camps and eventually board trains that take them home.
Here Amis risks diminishing the horrors of the concentration camps by deploying a gimmicky, narrative trick; indeed, Amis was criticized for placing narrative experimentation above history and at the expense of outrage. However, this narrative device occasions an interactive experience: The narrator-soul misses the point of the horror and delights in identifying with the doctor, given the apparent movement toward happiness. It is the readers who must understand the magnitude of the brutality that appears to be erased so casually: From the vantage point of a half century later, readers understand the savage irony of watching the doomed Jewish people depart the camps. Amis compels his readers to act as the narrative’s conscience. As the life of Odilo Unverdorben (ironically German for “uncorrupted”) continues its reverse path back to childhood, back to the arms of his own mother, and ultimately back to his own birth, readers understand the implications of the narrative device. Unverdorben is offered as that most terrifying figure of twentieth century history: a creature without a soul. Thus, the occasion of his death alone engenders a moral conscience that must helplessly watch the consequences of such inhumanity.
Sources for Further Study
Dern, John A. Martians, Monsters, and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. 2d ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Time Runs Backward to Point up a Moral.” The New York Times, October 22, 1991, p. C17.
Keulks, Gavin. Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Locke, Richard. “The Past Recaptured, Crab-Style.” The Wall Street Journal, December 23, 1991, p. A7.
Truehart, Charles. “Through a Mirror, Darkly: Martin Amis Wrote a Novel in Reverse and Brought the Holocaust Full Circle.” The Washington Post, November 26, 1991, p. B1.
Vice, Sue. Holocaust Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2000.