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Eva's Time

EmmaBE's picture

I really enjoyed talking about the way Eva's time was structured in the novel because it was a concept I hadn't connected with the book. I think that the way we experience time through Eva's eyes in the novel shows us a new kind of way to look at a life in retrospective. The way that each event in the book is somehow connected with what came before it shows Eva as a conglomeration of everything that has happened to her, a rolling snowball of events picking up mass and steam. She crips the reader's experienced time with the way she unreliably (non-normatively) narrates. She is, as we discussed in class, stuck - living all her life at once, and after she has been forced out of the productive timeline into prison, she will remain stuck. She is stuck not only in her cell or her self, but in the institutions that cyclically continue to abuse her, about which she remains silent.