Martin Amis Time's Arrow Sparknotes

In Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the protagonist (if one may call Odilo a protagonist, or even ascertain exactly who is narrating the story) utilizes a first-person narrative voice to detail his life as it unwinds in reverse. The effect is often hilarious, the narrator—Tod’s soul or conscience, if it may be conjectured—epitomizing irony; an extremely limited perspective viewed by a less limited perspective. For instance, he describes the “beginning” of his career as a doctor as something “you don’t want to hear about…One night I got out of bed and drove—very badly—to an office. I then had a party with all of my new colleagues. At six o’clock I…donned a white coat and started work. What at? Doctoring!”(22) The irony is striking on multiple levels:
he thinks that his fellow doctors are “new” colleagues, and that he has just begun his career without any training, not to mention that he has celebrated before working at all and presumably is working in an impaired state. But the source of this funny irony is not simply humorous.
It illustrates an important point about the nature of moral judgments and understanding our surroundings. One who sees time unfold properly would see a doctor properly celebrating his retirement (and might rebuke him for driving drunk), or, given the backwards narration, the wherewithal to see that there’s something terribly wrong about drinking before doctoring. But from Tod’s conscience’s perspective, it is all simply arbitrary; he cannot distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, because things that happen seem to have arbitrary consequences. From the first-person voice, perspective is limited to the extent that moral judgments are impossible, and confusing when Tod attempts to confront them. With no grasp of empirical causes and effects, attempts at understanding the world are futile, and the narrator’s lack of comprehension is exacerbated by his first-person perspective. Amis switches the tense when Odilo “arrives” at Auschwitz to bring the narrator—and the reader—to a state of being able to comprehend cause and effect, the central premise necessary for assigning moral
judgments. At that moment “the world has stopped making sense”(149) to Odilo, forever rendered a spectator, but the reader is granted a clear view into the moral perversion of particular historical actors. The stark shift in narrative voice occurs with the beginning of chapter 7 of the novel, when “the war is over” and “life goes on”(149) though it once again makes no sense to Odilo’s conscience. He is mostly occupied with his relationship to Herta, starting the new train of thought with “She loves me, she loves me not,”(149) a stereotypical rumination of the uncertain romantic, signifying a kind of growing distance from the unsavory work he was recently revealed to be doing. The narrator moves to talk about Odilo’s sexual prowess as part of his romantic life, noting that Odilo is extremely “potent” and that Herta can barely walk over the course of their “two-year orgy.”(150) But to the narrator, these lascivious details are proof of Odilo’s “personal campaign,” as if Odilo having vigorous sex and trying to have a baby is a military operation. This is not surprising after all that our narrator has deduced from his upside-down world, and he recalls, “Violence creates,” the analog of which might be that sex, or perhaps simply peace, destroys. This detached narration creates a disturbing, confusing vision of Odilo’s life before the war. Odilo’s violence might not be a figment of his conscience’s imagination, given Odilo’s yet unrealized capacity for death and destruction might reasonably have him engaging in sexual violence against his wife. But if he is simply having vigorous, passionate sex, he might simply be fulfilling his spousal duty and Herta might have no problem with it. A narrator in our narrator’s place, detached from Odilo’s inner thoughts and intentions, cannot reliably judge what is going on, cannot distinguish a horrid act of violence from a mutually pleasurable act, no matter what direction time is moving. Peculiarly, the narrator insists in two separate sentences within this episode, “Odilo is innocent.” It sounds as if the narrator is attempting to convince himself that there’s nothing wrong with what he’s seeing. It’s a matter of faith, of turning a blind eye to the reality that’s been presented to maintain a narrative not based on empirical evidence. This is essentially the message of the narrator’s third-person detachment coupled with the reversal of time that colors the whole story. People may rationalize anything if they fail to see cause and effect, whether by their own volition or out of lack of empirical clarity. When the reader sees the narrator failing to comprehend cause and effect when he reasonably could, the reader is forced to recognize that being a spectator in reality is a choice, and individuals need not be the moral bystanders that the narrator is. The refrain that best illustrates the narrator’s perspective as a first-person voice is the rationalization that “You have to be cruel to be kind.”(17) He sees his work as a doctor as a cruel activity, something that makes him “avert his eyes,”(26) though he knows “intellectually” that “violence is salutary.” The reader finds the question begged: how does he know this is violence? If one grew up in a world where inserting a nail into the head of a patient would cause the head to heal suddenly when nature reabsorbs the nail, one would not think it’s violence at all, but a healing procedure indeed. The narrator recognizes the kindness that seems to ‘effect’ from the doctor’s ‘causal’ procedure, even the connection between the two, but fails to see that what the doctor does is not cruel at all. Fittingly, at this juncture in his description of Tod’s professional life, the narrator attempts to distance himself from the first-person limitations that bind him. He calls Tod “aweless, distant,” in the course of his gruesome work, while deeming himself “squeamish,” trying to separate himself from the moment and distinguish himself as an impartial observer. But he fails: Tod’s body is “the one I live and move in.” Our narrator is aware of his own status as an inextricable observer of Tod’s life, but doesn’t see what the reader is privileged to see: causes do have effects and vice versa, and there exist both good and bad in the world. To be in the narrator’s position is to fail to truly grasp that, though he may try, and to bring the reader’s attention to mankind’s propensity to pervert morality through lack of proper perspective. The motif of Tod’s “perfectos,” his cigars, also serves to bring the issue of judgment, perspective, and their limitations to the reader’s attention.
Tod lights up his perfectos at all intervals of his life, and Amis pairs the perfecto with a properly alliterative adjective that is meant to represent how Tod is feeling at the time. The cigars are always “perfecto:” unchanging, constant, a barometer of how Tod really feels, regardless of how our narrator might be distorting reality. Odilo’s cigar is “penitent”(120) at Auschwitz, a bizarre choice of adjective for the given situation. Perhaps Amis is suggesting that the worst is over; the gruesome murder machine has been described, and the process of penitence has ‘begun’ for young Odilo. It could be, though, that this glimpse of omniscience is meant to cause the reader to question how much of the whole narrative is believable. Our narrator might describe the perfecto as penitent since he believes that Odilo is finally doing some good in his life. But the reader can step back and recognize that the adjective is horribly inapt. The contradiction between what a reader would ascribe to Amis (the first explanation) and to the narrator (the second) is precisely the point. The narrator can see the exact same thing as any observer at any given moment, but his inability to make judgments is shoved in the reader’s face. The perfecto, contradictory in its omnipresence and the narrator’s tendency to ascribe to it improper descriptions,
is yet another way Amis distinguishes the narrator—a guest in his own body, a perpetual spectator whose first- and third-person voices become increasingly indistinguishable—from the reader, the moral force charged with learning from the narrator’s narrow worldview. Amis’s overarching gambit of the narrator’s world unwinding in reverse is often confusing when disbelief is not suspended. The reader is never quite sure how the narrator knows historical events that have yet to happen; how he makes sense of language; and, most notably, how he can think that anything is good or bad. The confusion is intentional and instructive, as is the wavering between first- and third-person narrations. The narrator is not an actor, not quite a spectator, and any attempts he makes at discerning patterns in human behavior are simply his own contrivances. His perspective is perpetually ironic, with a miserable lack of a sense of causality. His lack of comprehension regarding a doctor’s work in society versus a Nazi’s is the starkest example of moral perversion, but his ruminations on Odilo’s sex life are equally revealing. The reader is told: our narrator has no valuable definition of ‘violence’ or its opposite at his disposal, but you do. You have the privilege to see time moving properly along its continuum. Do not fall victim to the pitfalls of moral uncertainty that trip our narrator up. Escape from the mindset of being a third-person voice in your own body and become an actor. Only then can you be a moral person and—at worst—an “innocent” one.