CHAPTER 6
The How and Why of
Backward Narration in
Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow
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N THIS CHAPTER, I continue to thicken the rhetorical account of character
narration, as I take up Martin Amis’s remarkable deployment of “backward
narration” (a telling that reverses the direction of time’s progression) in his
1991 novel about a Nazi doctor, Time’s Arrow. By saying that I will thicken my
account, I mean that I will not be offering new categories of unreliability so
much as extending the work of chapter 5 and my overall approach to charac-
ter narration in order to unpack the multiple ways Amis deploys the unusual
technique. I shall be concerned with the multiple effects that follow from his
deployment, including its bonding and estranging consequences, as well as its
ethical and aesthetic dimensions.
Because Amis’s character narrator experiences and reports time unfolding
in reverse chronological order—from death to birth rather than vice versa—
the backward narration functions as a global strategy for unreliability. Among
other things, reversing time’s arrow means undoing the default relations
between causes and effects. In general terms, Amis deploys the resource for
two purposes: to defamiliarize the atrocities of the Holocaust, a purpose that
the approximate forty-five year interval between the events and the occasion
of Amis’s telling makes more urgent, and to explore the psychology of a per-
petrator, a purpose that the interval makes more palatable. But following the
principles of rhetorical poetics and looking more closely at Amis’s handling
of the resource, I identify some other significant aspects of his communica-