Time's Arrow tells the story, backwards, of the life of Nazi war criminal, Doctor Tod T. Friendly. He dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home...Escaping from the body of the dying doctor who had worked in Nazi concentration camps, the doctor's consciousness begins living the doctor's life backwards.

One of the most interesting things about fictional nar ratives is that they do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with bizarre storyworlds which are governed by prin ciples that have very little to do with the real world around us. Even though many narrative texts teem with unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios that take us to the limits of human cogni tion, narrative theory has not yet done justice to these cases of unnaturalness or the question of how readers can come to terms with them. In what follows, I define the term unnatural and outline a cognitive model that describes ways in which readers can make sense of unnatural scenarios. Second, I use these reading strategies to discuss examples of unnaturalness in postmodernist narratives.1 Arguing that ideas from cognitive narratology help illuminate

Time's arrow, or the nature of the offence

Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

Preface 1. Speaking of war and memory 2. Forgetting to remember? 3. Wounds of memory 4. The truth of memory 5. Times of memory 6. Memory, uncertainty, responsibility.

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Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany

The essay examines the phenomenon of non-human storytelling. We take our departure from the paradoxical idea that readers are invited to reflect upon aspects of human life when reading the fictional life stories of non-human narrators, whether they are animals, objects, or indefinable entities. By giving voice to non-human things and animals such as a stuffed squirrel, a lump of coal, or a dog, these narratives may highlight and even challenge our conception of the human. In addition, they may confront us with our propensity to empathize with fictional autobiographical narrators and to narrativize our own lives in particular ways. On the level of meaning, there is a whole range of motifs, themes, and functions with which non-human narration may be associated in particular narratives. On the level of form and effects, however, there are interesting parallels between different non-human narrators. It will become clear that, even though the umbrella term “non-human narration” comprises a great variety of narrators, these character-narrators have something in common as a narrative device.

Time's arrow, or the nature of the offence

Citations

Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

Wounds of Memory: The Politics of War in Germany

The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators

Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Narrative, and Dissociation

To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition

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