tion. The most extraordinary feature of Amis’s handling of the technique is his
construction of what I call “pockets of reliability” within the overall fabric of
unreliability. In other words, despite using a technique whose default setting
is unreliability, Amis finds a way to build in some passages of reliability that
have ripple effects on the ethical, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of the
novel’s progression. In this and other ways, Time’s Arrow vividly demonstrates
the rhetorical principle that as skillful authors pursue their different purposes,
they often shape the resources at their disposal in ways that are simultaneously
surprising, ingenious, and effective.
As Susan Suleiman notes in a recent essay, historians and artists working
on the Holocaust have recently been giving more attention to the difficult
task of comprehending the psychology of the perpetrators. When under-
taken by novelists, as Suleiman shows in her insightful analysis of Jonathan
L i t t e l l ’s Les Bienveillantes, this effort inevitably raises significant ethical and
aesthetic issues, ones that are related in some degree to my discussion of
probability in fiction and nonfiction in chapter 3. How can the novelist plau-
sibly render the psychology of the perpetrator? How does history constrain
the fictional representation of perpetrators, and how does fiction provide
some freedom from the constraints of history? What are the ethical and aes-
thetic consequences of narrative techniques that put the reader in the posi-
tion of sharing the perpetrator’s perspective, even if the novelist marks that
perspective as unreliable?
Time’s Arrow is an especially intriguing case because Amis foregrounds the
psychological state of Odilo Unverdorben (the last name is German for uncor-
rupted or innocent) by emphasizing his dissociation of personality and using
one side of that personality, a figure I shall, following Seymour Chatman, call
Soul, to narrate the action.^1 The dissociation leads to Soul experiencing time
backwards, and that in turn radically alters his understanding of events as he
gives an account of Unverdorben’s life from the moment just before his death
to the moments of his earliest consciousness. In my analysis, I offer some
general reasons for—and consequences of—Amis’s technique, and then, for
the bulk of the chapter, undertake a more specific examination of its work-
ings, including a detailed account of how Amis manages the relation between
- Chatman’s essay “Backwards” does an excellent job of analyzing the basic mechanism
of the backwards narration and discussing its relation to similar techniques. Vice offers another
impressive analysis of Amis’s technique, one that effectively responds to the charge that Amis
is more interested in his narrative technique than in the subject matter of the Holocaust.
McGlothlin develops an instructive comparison between Time’s Arrow and another represen-
tation of a perpetrator, Bernhard Schlink’s Der Leser. Other insightful work on Amis’s novel
has been done by Diedrick, Harris, Finney, Easterbrook, and Dermot McCarthy, but none of
these critics focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of its technique to the extent that I do here.
118 • CHAPTER 6