Time's Arrow
A passenger consciousness wakes inside a dying American doctor and travels his life backwards, understanding nothing it sees: doctors open patients up and send them out bleeding, money is handed over shop counters in exchange for goods, lovers meet by quarrelling and part in tenderness. Running the film in reverse carries the passenger eventually to central Europe in the early 1940s, where for the first time the work makes moral sense to him. Amis's afterword names Robert Jay Lifton's study of the Nazi doctors as the book without which he could not have written it.
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Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
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- 49% · 13 shared