ABSTRACT
''KA IS A WHEEL: TIME IN STEPHEN KING'S ''THE DARK TOWER''
In his eight volume (and one novella) series The Dark Tower Stephen King presents a reader with an image of a world similar to our own, or it could even be argued, an alternate version of its’ very own future tainted by germ warfare and a nuclear catastrophe of disastrous global consequences. Throughout the series, King draws upon various elements commonly present in futuristic and post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels (even though The Dark Tower does not fall, in its own right, solely under that single genre) one of them also being the possibility of travelling through time and traversing freely the boundaries between parallel universes. In the first book of the series King acquaints
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When first encountered in The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, or as he is also known – Roland of Gilead, is depicted following the elusive man in black (who, as one learns later in the series, is known by the name of Walter O’Dim) who seems to be ‘urging’ Roland to take only one of the many steps which the journey to reach his final destination, the Dark Tower, will include. As the first pages of the novel are turned and the plot starts unraveling before the reader, one is becoming slightly more familiarized with Roland’s world through which he chases the mysterious man in black. The gunslinger’s world seems at some moments completely different than our own, but at a second glance it becomes all too similar to it. Sounds of an old song that turns out to be Hey Jude by The Beatles, or the ruins of the ancient temple dedicated to a deity known as Amoco which are found to be nothing more than the remains of an Amoco gas station owned by the Standard Oil Company originating in Indiana, strike the reader with a grim sense of strange familiarity. It is this strange version of our own world struck by germ warfare and a nuclear apocalypse that is the very place where Roland will meet a boy from the 70s New York named Jake Chambers, who will prove to become one of the crucial characters in Roland’s …show more content…
Going back into the past, interacting with it and consequently changing it in a way that creates a seemingly impossible situation in the future has long been present within science-fiction circles and has long secured its place as one of the most famous and interesting tropes within the genre. The first account of a temporal paradox present in a science-ficiton novel can be traced back to 1891 when Thomas Antsey Guthrie wrote his Tourmalin's Time Cheques which follows the story of a man who is granted the ability to deposit and later withdraw certain amounts of time in a cheque-like manner. The problem arises when the time deposited does not occur in a consecutive order, but is mixed up and the time arrow does no longer span linearly across the space-time continuum. Moreover, Michael Jameson’s Doubled and Redoubled first published in 1941 can be said to represent the first account of a “Groundhog Day” type of situation in which the protagonist of this work of fiction is bound to repeat a single day over and over again, with the same situations occurring in each iteration of the same cycle and always resulting in an identical outcome only to be repeated time and time again.
Time: How does the way the writer moves between the past and present and future affect the structure of the book? How might this technique inform my approach?
As Jake travels to Derry to change the outcome of his student’s childhood, King references two characters that he has used in the past horror novel, IT, this automatically set the tone for past readers knowing the characters Beverly and Richie, who set a dark presence in Derry. I saw this theme as a huge red flag saying “danger
Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s career, an unorthodox handling of time became one of many signature features in his fictional works (Allen 37). Despite The Sirens of Titan (1959) being only his second novel, this trademark is still prevalent. When delving into science fiction, it is often helpful to incorporate ideas from other works within the genre. This concept is exemplified by the “megatext,” an aspect of science fiction that involves the application of a reader’s own knowledge of the genre to a new encounter (Evans xiii). By working within the megatext, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) provides an insightful avenue in exploring the handling of time and its consequences in Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.
Nat Turner's belief that he was a mystic, born for some great purpose; a spiritual savior, chosen to lead Black slaves to freedom, justified his bloody rebellion against slave owners in Virginia. His actions did not so much spring from the fact that members of his family had been beaten, separated or sold, but rather from his own deep sense of freedom spoken in the Bible. From the time Nat Turner was four-years-old, he had been recognized as intelligent, able to understand beyond his years. He continued to search for religious truth and began to have visions or signs of being called by God. By the time Nat Turner reached manhood, the path his life would take was clear; his destiny would be to bring his fellow slaves out of bondage.
In the favela of São Paulo, Brazil, 1958, Carolina Maria de Jesus rewrote the words of a famous poet, “In this era it is necessary to say: ‘Cry, child. Life is bitter,’” (de Jesus 27). Her sentiments reflected the cruel truth of the favelas, the location where the city’s impoverished inhabited small shacks. Because of housing developments, poor families were pushed to the outskirts of the city into shanty towns. Within the favelas, the infant mortality rate was high, there was no indoor plumbing or electricity, drug lords were governing forces, drug addiction was rampant, and people were starving to death. Child of the Dark, a diary written by Carolina Maria de Jesus from 1955 to 1960, provides a unique view from inside Brazil’s favelas, discussing the perceptions of good
If a two-way communicator existed across time for this to be achieved the two metaphysical considerations must be met. Firstly, Lewis highlights the that “time is one dimension of four”, in the fourth-dimensional world, suggesting that time is just as perceptible as any place and potentially where the time traveller will send the message. Second, fourth-dimensional spectrum also considers causation and possible reverse causation, that is there must be awareness for earlier events to be causally dependable on the future events, and therefore how communication will take place between two different times. Lewis argues that his grandfather paradox can provide solidarity with the past, only if a time traveller was to travel to the past, they would not be able to make any changes that may potentially lead to them never
By going back and forth between the time frames, the first being in the present and the second being in 800,000, H.G. Wells lets the reader know that the time traveller has made it back from the future by providing passages that prove he made it home, to the present, alive. However, during the time span of the novel, the time traveller from the future did not know that he was able to escape the future. This changes the point of view throughout the story, even though the main character doesn’t change. Because of the changes in the time frame, the time traveller in the present and the time traveller in the future can be considered different people. “Selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for an explosion that never came. Of course the (dynamite sticks) were dummies, as I might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that, had they not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx, bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine, all together into nonexistence.” In this excerpt, the time traveller is speaking of his own adventure after coming back from the future. However, he makes it sound as if he were in the future. By putting interjections into the story, he changes up the storyline
Once the Time Traveler returns only one person believes the event that have unfolded. No one takes action to stop this future from happening and the Time Traveler disappears into the future never to be heard from again. The ending is meant to force the reader to think about whether they believe the problems that Wells wrote about, and if they will do anything. “The Day of an American Journalist in 1889” by Jules Verne depicts a utopia in the future that contrasts The Time Machine. The singular parallel is their failure to prolong the life of humanity. The narrator states after the failure of the experiment “As for yet no means has been found of increasing the length of the terrestrial year” (Verne 14). The terrestrial year stands for the longevity of the human race and they cannot change that. Whether there is a de-evolution or a creation of a utopia no one can stop time. These ideas tie into Asimov's idea of reactions of humans to scientific advancement, or lack thereof. One future is depicted as a Utopia and the other as a Dystopia but both fail in prolonging humanity's existence, which illustrates the need for many people to take action despite the odds. The end result is the reader forms a new perspective, that is the point of a time travel
The book The Time Machine has various key elements that connect with literarily terms. Another connection that Wells makes us wonder is the time in this story, whether its human time or geologic time.
Heart of Darkness was based on Conrad’s personal experience in the Congo in 1890, during this time King Leopold of Belgium colonizes Central Africa and forms the Congo Free State. Leopold 's original purpose for colonizing Congo was to harvest Ivory. As a consequence, King Leopold, who was a tyrant used his powers and weapons to force the Congolese’s to work to death. In the same way, that the Hearth of Darkness unfolds; it shares the similarity in which the people of Congo were treated under the authority of Leopold. “The work as going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die: “They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,
The Chronicles of Narnia are veritably the most popular writings of C.S. Lewis. They are known as children’s fantasy literature, and have found favor in older students and adults alike, even many Christian theologians enjoy these stories from Lewis; for there are many spiritual truths that one can gleam from them, if familiar with the Bible. However, having said this, it is noteworthy to say that Lewis did not scribe these Chronicles for allegorical didactics of the Christian faith, but wrote them in such a well-knit fashion that young readers might understand Christian doctrine through captivating fantasy and thus gain an appreciation for it. With this in mind, and in the interest of this assignment, the purpose of this paper is an attempt to analyze one of the many doctrines of the Christian faith from The Lion, The Witch, And, The Wardrobe (LWW), namely, temptation and how Lewis illustrates it through an individual character, Edmund.
“Can the future affect the present, and can the present affect the past?”(1) This is the question posed by the philosophical concept of retrocasualty – the product of time travel to the past. Time travel has been a common staple in science fiction writing, so many of its explanations owe their origins to tales of protagonists discovering its often confusing implications. Many people may already have a great understanding of a few hypothesized behaviors of time travel due to popular media, such as Back to the Future, Star Trek, and many other works of fiction. Currently, scientific knowledge is too premature to know if time travel is possible, no less how it behaves, so questions and answers are open for anybody to contemplate. The most famous question of time travel is the one posed by the temporal paradox, in which the time traveler invokes a condition which causes the circumstances that led up to time travel, or the time traveler’s presence, to become impossible. Many theories have attempted to answer this paradox, introducing behaviorally diverse concepts such as merging time lines, multiple dimensions, or a nature of time where everything is predestined. The act of time travel can produce radically different effects, depending on which solution to the temporal paradox is applied.
In the heart of Africa lies darkness beyond that of night. Africa, still mostly undeveloped and covered in wilderness has a beast hidden within waiting to be let out. It is widely known that the primal instincts of a human are savage. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, darkness is not just found in the pigment of one’s skin; it is found in the primal instinct of all human beings, and every human starts with a heart of darkness.
Beckoning readers closer, the gloomy foreboding of a mysterious darkness has typically been indicative of an antagonist or a horror that is to follow, and the glory of a shining light has signified a positive connotation. The pair is often utilized to express an author’s ideas and theme and Joseph Conrad uses the two paradigms liberally in his interpretation of European colonialism in Heart of Darkness. While Conrad employs the typical binary of light and darkness as positive and negative forces, respectively, he also challenges this notion by exposing the contradictions of misdeeds done in light and the portrayal of darkness as a sanctuary.
Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness, was written in the year 1902, a time of modernist literature. Heart of Darkness talks about the problems with alienation and confusion as much as it does about imperialism. In the early 1900’s, the lifestyle in England veered towards the Victorian values. Conrad’s novella makes a bridge to connect the Victorian values with the ideas of modernism. Thus “it belongs to a period of change.”(Sardar) For example, the natives are following in the footsteps of their predecessors, following a life of tradition, and their ideas of life are constantly being attacked by people like Mr. Kurtz who think they are doing what is best, when in reality they are creating more confusion