How Does an Author Construct a Layered Narrative to Make it Appear Innate?

            Texts that utilize temporal play are my preference to read for both enjoyment and analysis; fiction and nonfiction texts that include multiple timelines, multiple points of view, juxtaposition of texts, and intertextuality will always move to the top of my to-be-read pile. I will even read a young adult novel that mentions any of those devices in its blurb. So while experiencing J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S., because “reading the text” does not adequately describe what I had to do, I wondered, “How does an author create this? How does he or she keep everything straight but also realistic?” I thought about some of my favorite layered narratives from this course and from my past reading, and I searched for interviews with the authors. I expected to find a similar thread of method, but, instead, I found many vague answers with little commonality.

            The most straightforward multiple narrative text that I own is The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition prepared by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation; I’ll be honest in that I own it because my collection of books by and about Anne Frank would not be complete without it, but I have not read it because the format is not comfortable for reading. This critical edition is a compilation of the three versions of the diary: 1) Anne’s original diary that is honest reflection of the life in hiding of an adolescent Jewish girl in the 1940s; 2) Anne’s edited and rewritten version of her original diary onto loose leaf paper; and 3) Otto Frank’s edited version for public consumption after World War II. Anne documented that the group in hiding had listened to a radio address by “Gerrit Bolkenstein, Minister of Education, Art, and Science in the Dutch Government” delivered  in London in which he stated, “If our descendants are to understand fully what we as a nation have had to endure and overcome during these years, then what we really need are ordinary documents—a diary, letters from a worker in Germany, a collection of sermons given by a parson or a priest” (Netherlands 59). Anne rewrote her diary with a future audience in mind and “drew up a list of name changes: ‘Anne [Frank]’ became ‘Anne Robin,’ ‘v. Pels’ became ‘v. Daan,’ ‘Pfeffer’ became ‘Dussel’” and so on (Netherlands 61-62). However, when Anne’s father Otto read his daughter’s diaries, he had “[h]ighly personal motives” to make additional changes before publication: “his strong attachment to his dead daughter; his awareness that with publication he would be putting into effect Anne’s dearest wish—to become a famous writer one day; and his feelings of respect, first and foremost towards his dead wife, but also towards those others about whom Anne had made less than pleasant remarks” (Netherlands 166). Gerrold van der Stroom suggests that a reader of the critical edition could “follow only what Anne Frank wrote in her first draft, he should read version a and ignore versions b and c. He will then be reading the book horizontally” (Netherlands 169). However, the layout of the three versions—one on top of the other to be read in a 1/3 of a page horizontal—does not feel natural.

            The text that immediately came to mind when I heard the description of S. was the Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock. The series began as a trilogy but ended as a series of seven books; I have read and own the first five (I didn’t know that numbers six and seven existed until I searched to verify the number; interestingly, number seven was released this past week on March 22^nd). Unlike S., this series does not include an original text; rather, the narrative is told through correspondence, letters and postcards. Like S. each author has a distinct handwriting. Each text is very visual with the fronts of the envelopes and postcards drawn on the pages; the backs of the postcards are also drawn so that they cannot be handled. But the letters are physically inside envelopes attached to the page so that the reader must remove each letter to read it. While a linearity exists within the texts, the texts play with the temporality especially in consideration of setting and reality. In an interview with IndieBound, Bantock describes his process: “I work in a circle. If I don't know what comes next, then I simply move on to something else. I tend to work from the middle outwards. An image will give me an idea for the text, and the text will give me an idea for an image, and I build up from the center outwards.” He admits that his method “sounds like new-age tripe, but I start where the book wants to start. Images and ideas are always floating through my head. It's a constant process. I'll do a little drawing, put it on the wall, and little by little things start to belong and have a place. Then it's moving them around until they have a place, like a jigsaw.” Bantock concludes that his books are “a cross between a jigsaw puzzle and a collage that you just keep moving and moving and moving. There's a point where there's some kind of internal click.” Not exactly a process that can be duplicated, but one that makes sense; once the text feels natural, the “click” occurs. Natural is not a construct but rather a feeling.

            A text that I both enjoy and have analyzed in Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. I read the book because my junior high had put on the play; as an education major, the conflicts faced by English teacher Sylvia Barrett and her colleagues resonated with me. When I had to choose a text for my master’s thesis, I chose Up the Down Staircase as my case study text, in part because it had almost no secondary analysis and in part because it was created as the juxtaposition of texts. Again, a linearity exists within the narrative; the plot moves from the first day of the fall term to the first day of the spring term. However, the narrative is a compilation of letters, memos, overheard dialogue, information written on chalkboards, and student work. All texts created by Bel Kaufman but ones that feel natural. The novel was based on a previously published short story “From a Teacher’s Wastebasket”; Kaufman described her process as “I had jotted down some scraps of paper, which juxtaposed together showed a picture of waste, of lack of communication, of discipline problems, of loneliness.” She had taught in the New York City schools, so Kaufman had first-hand experience in the texts that she created; the feeling of authenticity was corroborated the teachers from across the country who would write to say, “‘How did you know? You described my class, my students, my problem.’ And I treasure all the letters that they sent me.” While her texts don’t have the look and literal feel of the real texts, the reader cannot remove them from the book and, for example, the student work is not printed on lined paper nor is it handwritten, the emotions summoned by those teachers vouch for the naturalness of the texts.

            Another series that I have enjoyed reading is Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series that begins with The Eyre Affair. Fforde plays with texts that he assumes his readers will know, such as Jane Eyre, but he has created a different 1985 and a parallel universe that is inhabited by the literary characters. Think of it as a living library in which the characters rest outside their texts when they are not on pages being read, and in which the characters can travel between texts and actually change the texts. Intrigued? Then I strongly encourage you to pick up The Eyre Affair. This fantasy element is realistic as long as the reader brings in the requisite suspension-of-disbelief. To create the multiple timelines, time travel, and parallel universes, Fforde was inspired by “[b]ooks, radio shows, newspaper reports, 70s sitcoms, films, plays. The Eyre Affair has tons of ideas compressed into it; if something amuses or grabs my attention then I try to attach it leech-like to the story and then let it grow” such as, “the Charge of the Light Brigade, Jane Eyre, the biggest corporation ever, an explanation of spontaneous human combustion, the notion of catching a meteorite with a baseball mitt, arguing about who wrote Shakespeare's plays, driving through a time warp and a police department that deals with werewolves.” Fforde describes his process as a “continuous linking of disparate strands [. . .] that [he] find[s] very enjoyable and quite challenging.” He admits that the “[c]ross-genre feel of the book put a huge amount of publishers off (76 rejections) and the précis itself condemned the manuscript to be unread by everyone I approached -- until my agent, hungry for material, read the whole thing, loved it and sold it to Penguin seven weeks later.” So someone had to give the narrative a chance in its entirety to be able to appreciate the innateness that results from Fforde’s construction.

            The novel that I am analyzing for my Pecha Kucha is Violent Ends edited by Shaun David Hutchison. This young adult novel caught my attention after I received an advanced reader copy at the ILA conference in July 2015. The plot about a school shooting, one of my worst fears, did not draw me in; rather, it was the blurb describing a story told through seventeen points of view written by seventeen young adult authors. I was hooked. The novel is amazing; I believe that it only received one starred review because the topic is not the usual bubbly young adult fare. The idea belongs to Hutchison; he explains on the Violent Ends website that “I had this crazy idea to write a story about a young man (Kirby Matheson) who brought a gun to school and shot his classmates. I didn’t want to tell the story of the shooting itself, but rather the story of the shooter as told by the people who knew him” and to do so “I wrote out a list of authors I could only dream of working with. Authors who works I loved and whom I respected immensely. I was certain they would laugh at my crazy idea. I wasn’t proposing an anthology, but a single story written by seventeen different authors.” When the authors agreed to Hutchison’s proposal, they worked “in a shared world with shared characters and shared histories. Each story would stand alone but would also be connected to all the others in both major and minor ways. [. . .]  We worked together online, trading inspiration, feeding off each other’s ideas, and hammering out the details of the school layout and what kind of car Kirby Matheson drove.” Because of this collaboration, with multiple writers paying attention to the numerous details, this disjointed narrative told from multiple points of view and over multiple settings (time and place) creates a realistic account of a school shooting.

            So, what about some of the novels we have read? Julia Alvarez explains that “it’s never as easy or clear a process when you are inside a mess and trying to make it a novel,” but years later she realized that the structure of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents “should recreate the way that I want the reader to experience the story. And that’s when I thought, I want my reader to be thinking ‘like an immigrant,’ always ‘going back to where we came from’; instead of progress toward a climax, a return to a homeland.” Alvarez’s construction came from her desire to make the experience natural.

In an interview with Robert Alford, Jennifer Egan explains that she was influenced by both Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and HBO’s The Sopranos in constructing her narrative. Proust influenced her choice to write a novel that spans years: “I especially loved Proust’s ability to capture the transformations and reversals that happen over time, the way that outcomes are so often unexpected and in fact almost the opposite of what you would expect.  The biggest question for me was how to capture the sweep and scope of those transformations and reversals without taking thousands of pages to do it.” To answer the question of “How?” was answered by narrative created for The Sopranos: “I was also watching The Sopranos, which also unfolded at a leisurely, kind of real time pace, through which the children in the series grew up, and all of the characters visibly aged,” which is accomplished through “this lateral approach in [. . .] in which a minor character suddenly becomes a major character for a while and then goes out of focus again, and the overarching story is almost invisible at times in the face of subplots and complications that are so engrossing that one almost would forget what the story, capital S, of the season was.” According to Egan, a narrative that draws in the reader or watcher with such intensity that one will not notice when characters appear or disappear creates an innate experience.

Finally, S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. Abrams is honest about his role as conceiver; he was intrigued by a novel he found in an airport that had a message written on the inside cover: “To whomever finds this book—please read it, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find it.” He thought, “[W]hat if there were a very cool book that was completely annotated—just covered in marginalia and notes between two people? And—what if a conversation, or a relationship, began inside a book?” When pitched the idea years later, Dorst was excited by “the challenge of telling a story in this really restricted form” and added his own twist, “[W]hat if there were a mystery about its author? It seemed like it would be really, really fun to make up an entire bibliography and history about this writer. From there, it was a small step to deciding that the people who are reading the book should be book geeks themselves.” Dorst describes constructing both Ship of Theseus and S.: “I would’ve been well-served if I’d had a whiteboard, but I’m a fundamentally disorganized person, and I had nothing resembling an organizational system! I wrote Ship of Theseus first, all the way through—everyone agreed that it really had to be able to stand on its own—and then I layered in the marginal notes. A lot of it was trial and error.” Throughout the process, Dorst shared his work with Abrams and Abrams’s Bad Robot colleague Lindsey Weber; Abrams compared the process to writing a screenplay: “There were outlines and pitches at the beginning, then early chapters. Lindsey would often work with Doug, and then show me stuff.” Interviewer Joshua Rothman attests to the authenticity of the marginalia: “And the language in which the handwritten letters and notes are written feels very natural in its cadences. You feel like you’re snooping on something intimate,” and Abram confirms their desire to construct an innate experience: “It’s intended to be a celebration of the analog, of the physical object. In this moment of e-mails, and texting, and everything moving into the cloud, in an intangible way, it’s intentionally tangible. We wanted to include things you can actually hold in your hand: postcards, Xeroxes, legal-pad pages, pages from the school newspaper, a map on a napkin.” Like Garcia, Abrams and Dorst had a desire to construct an innate text.

Although some of the authors purport to focus on construction, those authors all implied that they know they are finished when the text feels complete, which is not much different from the authors who start with the desire to create an authentic experience for the reader. They, too, know that they are finished when the text feels complete. The common thread seems to be a willingness to be open to all possibilities combined with a willingness to revise until the jigsaw is complete. Not a definitive answer, but at least it’s not a formulaic one either.

           

Abrams, J.J. and Doug Dorst. S. London: Mulholland Books, 2013. Print.

Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical

            Edition. Ed. David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and

            B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday. New York: Doubleday, 1989. Print.

How the Garcia Girls Found their Identities

How the Garcia Girls Found their Identities

            Throughout her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Julia Alvarez uses a reverse chronological timeline, coupled with a variety of narrative techniques to show how time and experience affected each of the Garcia girls to create individualized personalities. Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofia are the different products of very similar lives that due to their interpretation of time resulted in four unique perspectives.

            When a reader picks up a book, it’s common to expect that the story will start at the beginning and at the end, all the mysteries will be revealed. In How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, that isn’t the case. As the audience, we are given the end point. The first experience we share in is Yolanda’s return to the Dominican Republic after a long time away. Slowly, we begin to realize that this isn’t a casual vacation. Yolanda feels disconnected from what we learn to be her roots and yet, she feels them calling to her: “when she returns to the States, she’ll find herself suddenly going blank over some word in English or, like her mother, mixing up some common phrase. This time, however, Yolanda is not so sure she’ll be going back,” (Alvarez 7). It would usually be safe to assume that the plot would move forward from this point with the occasional flash back or back story explanation and end with Yolanda’s decision on whether to stay or not. Instead, we’re thrown into a scene in the not so distant past and are left wondering what to make of the antojos that Yolanda worked so hard to find.

            Slowly, we piece together not only the life of Yolanda, but also the lives of her three sisters. As we work our way through their experiences in both the United States and the Dominican Republic, we wonder where it is that the novel will lead us. What is the singular catalyst that sent the Garcia Girls on their journeys to self-actualization, if we can call the moment of introduction that? Instead of building character development, Alvarez sends us on a journey to deconstruct one scenario after another to make sense of the girls’ identities. This reversal of the traditional timeline really forces us as readers to ask “what happened first?” instead of  “what happens next?” We shift our focus from the anticipation of the grand finale that we have been trained to yearn for so desperately to the curiosity of how a character and a world is built and what that means. We look closer at how we connect with these characters and how we share or disagree with opinions of time and how it affects us.

            Part of how we experience the Garcias’ lives has to do with the narrative style with which each chapter is given. Throughout the novel, we see the different scenarios through third person narrative (she, her, they) or through first person narrative (I, we, us) with a fluctuating omniscient (all-knowing) aspect. There are times where we seem to be watching the Garcias lives their lives like they’re a TV series and then there are those when we see ourselves in their shoes. Though the amount of time that passed in each chapter varied, time seemed to go slower for me as I read the chapters that were in the first person narrative. These seemed to hold more weight and therefore take up more time while the third person chapters seemed to pass by quickly.

            For me, this difference in relative time had to do with the connections that were being made. Third person narrative chapters skimmed over (seemingly) common issue that any reader may be able to relate to if they were to pick up the novel (Yo loosing touch with her roots in “Antojos” for example) while giving them an immigration twist through the girls’ individual thoughts and experiences that come from an all-knowing narrator. These situations give broad senses that can be empathized with and therefore don’t need the same amount of attention as ones that deal strictly with personal experiences that need more relative (but maybe not literal) time. It is the chapters that deal with extreme cultural clashes that suck us in with the first person narrative so that we can sit and think through what these girls are feeling and why.

You can believe we sisters wailed and paled, whining to go home. We didn't feel we had the best the United States had to offer. We had only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and white TV afflicted with wavy lines. Cooped up in those little suburban houses, the rules were as strict as for Island girls, but there was no island to make up the difference. (Alvarez 107)

As the daughter of immigrants and a frequent visitor of my parents’ childhood homes, it is still difficult for me to fathom what the girls felt when they were thrust into a new world that had little in common with what they found familiar. I can imagine that as audiences become more and more detached from their immigrant roots, it gets harder to relate to this feeling and so we must pay closer attention. For this reason, Julia Alvarez uses a collective first person narrative in “A Regular Revolution” to thrust readers into the minds of all four girls at once. Because we are not as comfortable with these situations (well, many of us aren’t as comfortable with this situation) we slow down; we take in each sentence and attempt to create a more vivid image that we can relate to.

Each individual “girl” goes through similar experiences as her sisters, but each one finds a different path for life. They all come from a warring country and move to a foreign land at a young age. They all experiment with American culture and get sent away to boarding school together. They all experiment with, struggle with, and find their sexual identities. They all feel pulled to one another in order to relive and validate their life experiences. What they don’t do is come out as copies of one another. Even from a young age, the timeline of the sisters’ personalities were mangled. “It gave solace to the third daughter, who was always tentative and terrified and had such troubles with men. Her sister’s breathing in the dark room was like having a powerful, tame animal at the foot of her bed ready to protect her,’ (Alvarez 29). Though Sofia was the youngest and therefore had spent the least amount of time experiencing life, she held herself with an air that could not be achieved by the older girls. She commanded the attention of all those around her and tore away from her roots more easily than her sisters. This is one example as to why Sofia’s experiences happen at a different relative pace than her sisters’. She was the one most easily acclimated to their new life due to the limited amount of time she spent on the island.

Every chapter has a different view on the time that the girls spent together and apart. They create their own realities and we as the audience are given only glimpses to construct our own reality and timeline for the girls. We are left to puzzle over why the Garcias ended up who they were at the beginning of the novel with little to no explanation in the end. We reach a point very near the beginning of the Garcia girls as a unitary identity but we are not necessarily given a specific point of reference to say that their story stemmed from.

Yolanda herself declares to the audience “you understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story?” (Alvarez 289) on the second to last page of the novel. Whether she is referencing the current jump through history or the novel as a whole, it is unclear to me. Is that not what we do for ourselves? Do we not collapse our own narratives into neat little chapters that define us? Alvarez forces us to become the Garcia girls through this interweaving of narrative styles and reverse chronological order. Through our experiences with them, we may just learn to better appreciate our own time, to recognize the importance of the past and the present, and to not worry so much about where we will end up because what are we if not a compilation of every moment we have experienced.

Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin of

            Chapel Hill, 1991. Print.

Disrupting Circular Narrative Identity in Alvarez's "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents"

In Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, time is moving backward, yet the narrative is moving forward.  From the very first tale of Yolanda and the guavas, to each family member’s recollection of the guardias raids, the reader is gaining information and understanding the development of each character through what seems like a traditional linear narrative; however, as each chapter travels further backward into the lives of the Garcia girls and the nonlinear narrative is more obviously exposed, the chronological feel of the narrative progression is reluctant to slow down—each detail belongs to the beginning of the story, the present-tense, yet these same details are also threaded throughout the narrative during each chapter as they dip into the past.

The plurality of each character’s stories—the telling and retelling of events witnessed through a variety of perspectives, personalities, and phases—constructs a narrative identity throughout the novel. David Wood believes that narrative “links together history, literature, and biography with the fragments of self-understanding by which we come to understand ourselves and our lives in conversation with our friends” (22). If narrative acts as a link between these three key components, then narrative identity can be understood as the personality of story-telling and perspective that emerges from the linkage—not just the who or what of history, biography, and literature, but the who, what, when, where, and why of any given story in conversation not only with itself, but with other texts and their readers.

David Wood argues that “narrative identity stresses the intelligible organization of events at the expense of the will, the ethical moment, the moment of decision, of impetus” (32). The reader witnesses these expenses several times throughout the novel. For example, in “The Blood of the Conquistadores,” a single event is retold several times. Each retelling focuses more on the organization—the details of what is happening in a chronological manner—rather than focusing on the individual moments or emotions of each character. Although there is specific character-driven personality in each section, the chapter is strung together not by these individual retellings, but by the “intelligible organization” of the entire guardias event as a whole.

The reader can also witness similar moments throughout earlier sections of the book, where characters reference to another event or situation that has appeared in the novel’s past, yet still lingers the reader’s future through the nonlinear narrative. When characters discuss something like Sofîa’s relationship with Papi or Yolanda’s poetry, they are in conversation with each other, organizing the narrative events that will later unfold through the novel’s progression. Although the reader is able to distinguish the differences in opinion and personality regarding each character, character development is not necessarily chronological; instead, the development is circular—the past has determined the present, but because the reader cannot establish the details of the past, one must assume the present has, in some shape or form, also contributed to the past. As the narrative continues to progress, the circular narrative identity pattern widens, placing readers in opposition with themselves. Rather than each character representing a specific “ethical moment” or “moment of decision,” the characters, through the circular narrative of nonlinear time, become one.

 

Wood contends that “narrative does not just heal, it opens new rifts—first, the irresolvable plurality of stories, and then the opposition between the organizing power of imagination, on the one hand, and the will on the other (32). In other words, narrative exposes the reader to a variety of stories that are often impossible to distinguish, especially when dealing with narrative that utilizes both thought and action. Near the end of the novel, Yolanda breaks the narrative wall to ask the reader: “You understand that I am collapsing all time now so that it fits in what’s left in the hollow of my story?... I grew up, a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils” (289-90). Yolanda’s question comes after a retelling of the relationship with her kitten, a scene grounded in the past. Rather than ending the novel here, Yolanda’s inquiry thrusts the novel back into the present; however, there is no familiarity between the beginning of the book’s present and the concluding present confronting the reader.  

Yolanda’s question seems to function as both the “irresolvable plurality of stories” and the “opposition between the… power of imagination… and the will.” Yolanda is not only figuratively collapsing time, but as far as the timeline of the novel is concerned, she is also literally folding the stories inward.  The novel begins and ends with Yolanda—a further testament to the circular narrative identity pattern—and it becomes the reader’s task to understand the narrative morphing of each character’s specific stories rather than rely on Yolanda’s conclusion to determine what is happening. Once again, the narrative focuses on the organization of events, which Yolanda rehashes for nearly a page: “Then we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared altogether. I saw snow. I solved a riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was” (289). Like the grandmother, the reader might have difficulty remembering the distinguishing qualities of each narrative thread and, as Laura always remarked, simply refer to one as something by “the four girls.”

Because Yolanda is collapsing time as a method of concluding the narrative, she is also collapsing the narrative itself. Time has been the foundation of each of the stories—moving forward, yet always moving backward—and the plurality of the stories, including the multiplicity of perspective, supports such a claim; however, by stepping outside of the narrative and informing the reader of her actions, Yolanda ends the narrative at the beginning.

Temporal Play in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: How They Coincide

The temporal play that takes place in "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent" by Julia Alvarez felt as though it had connections to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In both novels, we see a main character(s) age backwards in time. In Fitzgerald’s work, we see the main character born as an old man and age in reverse. Although the characters in Alvarez’s work do not do the same, the time in the book does flow backwards, starting with the daughters fully grown adults and moving back into the age of children. By having the flow of time move in reverse for both stories, the reader is able to get a different perspective on the characters and how they move through time.

The first instance that a reader gets to see is the older age of characters in both stories. In the case of Benjamin Button, he is born an old man with knowledge but no experience to go along with it. This play on time shows the importance of having the experience to go with the age. Benjamin is born with the ability to read and speak fluently, but has no capability to use in. Comparing this with the Alvarez girls, the reader is introduced to fully grown women, with their parents now well into old age. Each woman has problems that they faced in their lives, but the reader has been introduced to these challenges. Much in the same way of reading the beginning of Benjamin Button, the reader has an ensemble of characters that are older with knowledge, but no backstory to how the characters got to where they are today.

While both stories move forward, we begin receiving some of the life experience that both characters share. In the case of Benjamin Button, as he begins to grow younger and younger, the life experiences an old man would have begin to happen for Benjamin. He tries to attend college, finds a woman he falls in love with, and eventually becomes married and has a child while running his family business. In the case of the Garcia girls, the reader starts to see some of the troubles that the girls faced growing up and becoming adults. Yolanda debates on returning to the island at the beginning of the story after what could be considered a failed life in America. She ends up a school teacher after being unable to become a successful poet. She has a lover that leaves her for his wife. Eventually it is even found out that she is institutionalized after a failed marriage with an earlier husband. These life experiences lead to the reflection that is found at the beginning of the novel.

As both novels continue to progress, the main characters keep becoming younger in age. We see Benjamin age back into a young man. He uses the time he has looking like a youth to join the military. He returns to college and becomes a football star. It’s not until the end of the story where he regresses all the way back to a small child the reader finds that the experiences Benjamin went through would be the same no matter which way he aged. In the case of the Garcia girls, the reader also sees them return to children on the island. They are first in the position of children just starting to grow up in America. Alvarez shows the readers the first few months the girls were there and the struggles they had. As the story moves along, she moves the girls and her parents back to the island and shows how they were chased from their homes. In the end, we get to see the innocence of the children, how the problems they faced were much different than of the adults we see at the beginning of the novel. A parallel I quickly noticed with both stories is at the end there are two characters that are reverted back to babies: Benjamin and Sofia. Although there may not be a direct connection, after all the rest of the Garcia girls are still small children, it’s interesting to note that both authors used this in their works.

The play on time in both novels tend to leave the reader with the idea that childhood and youth tend to be the best part of a person’s life. In both stories, the characters experience their best moments as teens and small children. The problems they face are small: for Benjamin, it’s the fact that he has his life experiences but no one takes them seriously any longer. For the Garcia girls, each face problems that any child would face when they’re young. The play on time for both authors seems to suggest that the reader should relish the enjoyment they had as a child, for as you get older, life becomes more difficult.

By telling the stories in a reverse order of time, the authors also allow for their readers to reflect heavily on the characters. Instead of having to develop the characters from the beginning, whether through flashbacks, or how they grow through the novel, the reader is challenged to think critically about the progression of them instead. With each Garcia girl, as they’re introduced, they are in the final stage of their character progression. They’ve already experienced life and are at the point they would be at in the end of the novel. The reader is challenged to begin piecing together, with different stories on different characters being told, how the girls and parents became how they were at the beginning of the novel. This play on time allows for a unique reading of the story. The same would go for Benjamin Button. By the end of the story, the reader is challenged to look at things from the opposite perspective if they desired. If you were to read Fitzgerald’s story backwards, would it read close to the life of an average person? The question is there for the reader to ponder.

The play on time for both stories offers a different way to go about reading texts. By having the characters already fully formed and moving backwards through time allows for a challenge to be presented. The story gives you the final conclusion, and it’s up to the reader to begin piecing how it got there. This perspective allows for the author to also explore what it means to have a finished character and begin writing backwards through time. The play on both is a perfect way to not only explore questions about life and age, but to develop new ways for potential writers to begin using time in their own writing as well.