Time and Chronology in Modern Novels: An Example of Woolf and Joyce

Abstract

The concept of time, once easily defined, remains an abstract quality. The order in which we experience events has important implications for our interpretation of those events. Although events can be presented in a chronological and continuous sequence, skilled story tellers will often deviate from this. Heidegger (1927) acknowledged that da-sein as thrownbeing- in-the-world comes across time as a series of “nows”. The importance of this attitude towards time and the understanding of the content and thought of modern novels, depend on the understanding of the treatment of time. It is in this context that this article attempts to provide a brief survey of two modern novelists, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce who exploited the displacement feature of language to defamiliarize our conception of time and chronology.