Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
The human being is an analytical creature. From scientists to philosophers to star-crossed teenaged lovers, the human is internally motivated to understand the world around him. That world provides countless puzzles for the human to solve, whether these puzzles lie in the forests of the heart, the laws of mathematics or the annals of history. However, some of the most unfathomable aspects of this world have been entirely created by humans. The Holocaust is one of the most unfathomable events in human history. Countless documentaries, pieces of literature, psychological analyses and films have explored the topic in an attempt to understand exactly how humans could commit such terrible atrocities against one another. Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, initially attempts to answer this question by exploring the life of a Nazi doctor. To do this, he separates the narrator’s consciousness from his mind, re-living his life backwards. In doing so, Amis tries to reverse the laws of entropy, to heal by un-creating human destruction. However, as the narrator (the doctor’s consciousness) eventually finds, reversing time’s arrow does not make the Holocaust fathomable. Therefore, in Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis suggests that humans will always manage to increase entropy, despite the reversal of time and the laws of the physical world.
The term “entropy” describes a “measure of disorder or randomness in an isolated system” (Dictionary.com). According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy of an isolated system will always increase over time. Therefore, disorder and randomness are constantly increasing. Amis drew from both this law and the work of the physicist A.S. Eddington in writing T...
... middle of paper ...
... undo the chaos that we had created.
Yet in Time’s Arrow, entropy is not just never truly reduced, it is ultimately increased. Thus, Amis argues that entropy’s effect on humanity is an inherently human creation. We create our own misery, our own disorder, our own chaos, regardless of the physical laws and the direction in which time is flowing. Therefore, in Time’s Arrow Amis suggests that humans are inherently entropic creatures, so much so that entropy as it pertains to us is less of a physical property, and more of a human characteristic.
Bibliography
Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. London: Vintage, Random House, 1991.
“Entropy.” Dictionary.com. 2004 http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=entropy
Menke, Richard. “Narrative Reversals and the Thermodynamics of History in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” Modern Fiction Studies 44.4 (1998) 959-980.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
Each and every one of us sees the world in a different light than each other. These differences in perception are not completely random. Everyone’s perception of the world around us is affected by certain factors. Both the autobiographical memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel, and the poem, “We grow accustomed to the Dark,” by Emily Dickinson, demonstrate a magnitude of factors affecting how we see the world. Night depicts Wiesel’s journey throughout the Holocaust, while “We grow accustomed to the Dark” exhibits our journeys when encountering new obstacles. Based on the universal concept of “How We See Things,” two factors that affect our perception of the world around us are our upbringings and our experiences when facing new obstacles due to the
Another reason why we study the Holocaust is to make sure that something like this never happens again. We can do this by knowing what it is, and possibly stopping it before it gets to be like what happened before. Also, we can be more aware of this, which allows us to identi...
The Holocaust an event so horrendous that uttering its name makes grown men tremble. The Nazi Party's wrath seemed unstoppable, likewise to a school bully picking its victims without the slightest of remorse. The events of the Holocaust were inhumane and discusting and are incapable of adaquate description through this paper or any for that matter. Eventhough the Holocaust has such an infamous negative connotation, it remains to be one of the most internationally well-known historical topics. The mystery that is Hitler, the mastermind behind the entire plot, is one code that may stay uncrackable for eternity. We are not completely in the dark as to his thoughts toward the "Final Solution" he meticulously devised though.
Some might of said that things couldn't get worse. But destruction spread even farther than the heart of the Holocaust. This, is where it gets interesting to study about the Holocaust. It starts to bring out anger and other actions fr...
The twentieth century was a time of change. With two world wars occurring within roughly three decades, it was no surprise that society became forever changed. These two world wars, however, resulted in perhaps one of the most significant and catastrophic events in history - the Holocaust. The Holocaust saw about six million Jews killed by command of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Despite resulting from World War II, however, Hitler’s massive genocide of European Jews was planned before the Second World War, and therefore was intentionalism, because of the blame from post-World War I Germany, the twentieth century movement of eugenics as a “racial hygiene”, and the actions to exterminate Jews before the outbreak of World War II.
Randomization, in the form of mutations, provides genetic variation. Evolution itself is not entirely a random process, but the mutations that have appeared throughout history are. Because of this, one would argue that with the summation of many mutations over time, evolution would inevitably create more randomization within the system resulting in an increase in disorder. In an isolated system, the overall entropy would undoubtedly increase following a series of mutations. Because of natural selection (the idea that an organism that is better suited to its environment will survive and produce more offspring than those organisms who are not), it can be said that chance mutations are not the only driving force behind evolution, thus evolution is not entirely a spontaneous process (Williams,
In the essay “Everything Now” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, author Steve McKevitt blames our unhappiness on having everything we need and want, given to us now. While his writing is compelling, he changes his main point as his conclusion doesn’t match his introduction. He uses “want versus need” (145) as a main point, but doesn’t agree what needs or wants are, and uses a psychological theory that is criticized for being simplistic and incomplete. McKevitt’s use of humor later in the essay doesn’t fit with the subject of the article and comes across almost satirical. Ultimately, this essay is ineffective because the author’s main point is inconsistent and poorly conveyed.
The atrocities of the Belgian Congo and the Holocaust are two of the main events in history that have been responsible for the mass murdering of millions of people. Although these events significantly changed the course of humanity, and the story behind each one is very different, there are significant factors that make them alike as well as different. Many would agree that comparing two atrocities that affected the lives of so many people and gave a 180-degree turn to each of their countries would be something very difficult to achieve. However, by comparing the behavior of both the perpetrators and the victims of both cases we might be able to further understand the lack of morality and the inspiration that led to these awful events. The perpetrators in both atrocities tended to have a similar pattern of behavior when it came to the way they saw their victims. But, they also acted in ways where you can draw the conclusion that one set of events was not inspired by the other. These two sets of atrocities were reported to have a very similar number of victims. However, the Holocaust is one of the most reminded events in history as a period of shame, tragedy and sadness, while many still ignore the atrocities in the Belgian Congo.
The secular definition of chaos can be misleading when the word is used in a scientific context. As defined by Webster’s dictionary chaos is total disorder. That may lead one to believe that chaos theory is indeed the study of total disorder, which it truly is not. In 1986 at a prestigious conference on Chaos another definition for chaos was introduced. It is stochastic behavior occurring in a deterministic set. This definition of chaos was hesitantly brought forth. The scientists, mathematicians and intellectuals present were hesitant to define a concept they did not truly understand yet. They left the scientific community with a rather cryptic and oxymoronic definition of chaos. Deterministic sets behave by precise unbreakable law. Stochastic behavior is the opposite of deterministic it has no finite laws, it is totally dependant upon ch...
In E.B. White?s The Ring of Time, the author gives a narrative account of his trip to a circus rehearsal where he describes a fascinating scene of a young girl practicing a horse act for an upcoming show. As a writer, he feels it is his obligation to record the events he is witnessing, and convey this to his readers without leaving anything out. However difficult this may be, the beautiful and fleeting moment is something he wishes to ultimately capture. When he arrives on the scene, White senses something magical about the surroundings of this circus as it undergoes a rehearsal, but he is primarily fixed on a young woman who passes by him. The young ?cleverly proportioned, deeply browned by the sun, dusty, eager, and almost naked'; girl is the one thi...
“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.” (Jordan, 1).
The Dice Man written by Luke Rhinehart is an incredibly thought challenging and intentionally provocative piece that knows no bounds and sought to cover every aspect of the human psyche. The exploratory nature of this book transverse across subjects that most novels and authors would dare not touch. Rape, murder, sexual experimentation, racism, drug use, adultery and senseless blasphemy. The Dice Man covers them all, and when presented with the title quote “This book will change your life” I would plainly agree and contend that it will not only change your life in some way but severely change your perspective on things.