Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time

About this book

Drawing on works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky Tolstoy and Chekhov by other writers as diverse as Sophocles Cervantes and George Eliot by thinkers as varied as William James Mikhail Bakhtin and Stephen Jay Gould and from philosophy the Bible television and much more Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience. Morson asserts that the way we think about the world and narrate events is often in contradiction to the truly eventful and open nature of daily life. Literature history and the sciences frequently present experience as if contingency chance and the possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a result people draw conclusions or accept ideologies without sufficiently examining their consequences or alternatives. However says Morson there is another way to read and construct texts. He explains that most narratives are developed through foreshadowing and "backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the fact) which tend to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities in each moment. But other literary works try to convey temporal openness through a device he calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to understand an event is to grasp what else might have happened.