Mikhail Bakhtin, in his essay “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” argues that the “chronotope” of a literary work – the configuration of time and the space in the fictional world that the text projects – is inextricably linked to its characters: “the image of man in literature is always intrinsically chronotopic”. (Bakhtin, 85 years old). In this article, I will apply his theory to two radically different texts that deal with time travel: The Time Machine by HG Wells and Kindred by Octavia Butler. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayH.G. Wells' The Time Machine contains three different chronotopes: the frame story chronotope of the short story, the future world chronotope of 802,701, and the post-apocalyptic world chronotope. The chronotope of the frame story is the chronotope of time travel, in which temporality and spatiality merge: time becomes "a fourth dimension of space" (Wells, 8), and it is therefore a link in which time and space are isotropic. A corollary of this unified space-time continuum is predestination, as the ability to travel through time presupposes a fixed history, in order to avoid various logical paradoxes, such as the grandfather paradox. Therefore, the free will of the characters located in the fictional world constructed around this chronotope has no ontological consequences; they are powerless to change their reality or shape their future. I suggest that the predestination that governs this fictional world is precisely the cause of the characters' lack of psychological depth: they are all standard characters, most named only after their profession and consistent with their reality. to their professional stereotype - the doctor is skeptical, the editor is curious and eager for a scoop, the psychologist listens attentively and pretends to understand and the time traveler is eccentric and fervent, like any "mad scientist" archetype. Their inherent flatness is the structural result of the time travel chronotope: complex characters with rich pasts, personal desires, passions, thoughts, and quirks are ill-suited to a world on which they have no impact. The chronotope of the future world of 802,701 is the chronotope of evolution. This future world is the end result of environmental changes brought about by upper-class humans, which in turn led to the division of the human race into two distinct species, one decadent and the other animal, due to the mechanism of natural selection, which prevents the preservation of traits that are no longer necessary for the survival of a species, such as intellect in the case of future humans. Natural selection, as described by Charles Darwin, links events together by contingency rather than design because it is based on random changes in the environment. We can, however, assert that natural selection does not negate determinism, since it is possible that a force beyond nature governs seemingly random environmental changes. Nevertheless, the implicit author of the story remains faithful to the Darwinist paradigm and constructs the chronology of this fictional world as mutable, as evidenced by the behavior of the time traveler: he acts as if he had free will and his actions have consequences. Furthermore, he blames the human race for its own deterioration: "I was saddened to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide." Presuming that the humans responsible for the situation could have acted differently. Thus, from the ontological point of view of the author involved, the fictional world ofintegrated narrative is governed by contingency. As a result, his chronotope is the intersection of unlimited space and linear time, with a mutable timeline, limited only by the quest for the Time Machine: by the time he retrieves it, the time traveler leaves this world and the time of discourse of this story comes to an end. The chronotope of evolution shapes characters differently than how they were shaped by the chronotope of time travel. The Time Traveler is no longer an archetypal mad scientist, but rather a complex man struggling to survive in a dangerous world. We are given a much deeper insight into his emotions and frailties: at first we see him losing control - "I remember running violently... beating the bushes with my clenched fists... laying my hands on them and shaking them together ." Later, he wastes his precious matches amusing the Eloi and, near the end of his journey, he accidentally burns an entire forest. However, the Time Traveler's psychological complexity is most clearly manifested in his attitude towards Weena: he states that "she was just like a child", and yet flirts with her - "she kissed my hands." I did the same thing with his.” ; he complains of having "had as much pain as comfort from her devotion", but immediately qualifies the complaint: "Nevertheless, she was, in one way or another, a very great comfort"; finally, he feels "the most intense misery for the horrible death of little Weena", but affirms that "she always seemed to me, I imagine, more human than she was, perhaps because his affection was so human.” In this context, it is interesting to note that the Time Traveler perceives affection as an inherently human trait, as none of the characters in the narrative frame display affection, although they are all "human" in the usual sense of the term. world. Additionally, the Time Traveler himself expresses affection only towards Weena. To recap, the Time Traveler's move from a world built around the chronotope of time travel to a world unified by the chronotope of evolution results in his transformation from a flat character to a round character. , which expresses the range of irrational behaviors and contradictory thoughts and emotions that characterize psychological depth. We can therefore assume that in this short story, the complexity of the characters is only made possible in a fictional world that involves temporal fluidity. Additionally, time in the future world of 802 701 leaves its marks on the time traveler "His coat was dusty and dirty...his face was horribly pale, his expression was haggard and drawn, as if from intense suffering" as time in the fictional world of the setting the narrative does not seem to alter the characters physically or mentally. This contrast is another corollary of the difference between the chronotopes of the two worlds. It is also worth mentioning the third chronotope of the novella, which is located at the heart of the fictional post-apocalyptic world. In this chronotope, space is limitless, while time is both limitless and static. On the one hand, temporality is a dimension of this world, because otherwise there could be no movement within it. On the other hand, life on this world is almost completely extinct - the sun is dying, civilization is long gone, and the only creature remaining is "a round thing...black on the blood-red water and bubbling” and lifeless. in many ways it makes no sense. Regardless, the chronotope of the post-apocalyptic world has little opportunity to influence the Time Traveler, as he quickly flees into "the horror of this great darkness". Theredifference between the formation of fictional characters by the chronotope of time travel and their shaping by the chronotope of evolution may also offer a solution to one of the central mysteries of the text: why does the time traveler decide to undertake another journey through time, when he barely escaped unscathed the first time? Apparently he travels in search of more tangible evidence of his travels. However, the Time Traveler cannot ipso facto report evidence substantial enough for people to believe him, because then, in all probability, the future he describes would be avoided by the precautions taken in his current time, and if the future that he described no longer exists, so it is not possible that he traveled to this future, thus creating a logical paradox. The Time Traveler, as a scientist, is probably aware of this paradox. I therefore suggest that he undertake a second journey through time because he wishes to enter, once again, into a world structured around a chronotope which, to the extent of his knowledge, does not dictate a fixed time line. He is well aware that the future of his own world is fixed, but by traveling to a world in which, from his limited perspective, the future can be open, the time traveler believes he is regaining control of his life. and control your destiny. Maybe that’s why “he never came back.” Octavia E. Butler's Kindred contains two chronotopes. The first chronotope, like that of the frame story of The Time Machine, is the chronotope of time travel. In order to distinguish it from the chronotope of The Time Machine, I will henceforth call it the “modern chronotope”, since it mainly deals with space and time in the 20th century. The temporal movement permitted by the modern chronotope is much more limited than that permitted by the Time Machine time travel chronotope. Dana, the narrator and protagonist, can travel across a vast expanse of time and space in a matter of moments, but this travel is limited to moving between her new home in Altadena, California, within a span of a few weeks between June 9 and July 4, 1976, and the immediate vicinity of Rufus Weylin in Maryland, during Rufus' lifetime between the 1830s and 1850s. It is important to note two things about this chronotope, regarding the instances in which Dana doesn't travel in time. First, at the diegetic level, the temporality is linear: the story advances in time from Dana's birthday to an unknown instance – "as soon as my arm was well enough" (after the end of time travel. At extradiegetic level, there are some external analepses and internal prolepsy (the loss of Dana's arm), but these anachronisms have no relevance to the discussion of the chronotope, because if we were to reconstruct the story from the. narrative discourse, these events would be part of a linear timeline Second, with the exception of the narrative anachronisms mentioned above, space is limited to Dana's house, precisely because of its anomalous spatio-temporal movement. : "I was always afraid to leave the house... While driving, I could easily kill myself, and the car would kill other people if Rufus called me at the wrong time. While walking, I could get dizzy and fall while crossing the street." Thus, the modern chronotope is an intersection of limited isotropic time and bounded space. However, despite the logical paradoxes of time travel, this chronotope does not create a fictional world governed by predestination. There is no textual indication that the fictional characters' actions lack ontological consequences, thereby reducing them to pawns of a fixed future. Quite the contrary, Danais portrayed as a particularly independent and free-thinking young woman, who responds to her boss decides to become a writer despite the objections of her uncle and aunt, marries the man she loves regardless of racial difference and disapproval family, and stands her ground when her husband tries to force her to engage in activities she hates, such as typing. Thus, although the implied author is clearly aware of the paradoxes of time travel, as she expresses through Dana's thoughts regarding Rufus: "His life could not depend on the actions of his unconceived descendant. No matter what I did, he would survive until Father Hagar. , or I could not exist. It made sense. it nevertheless creates an impossible world that contains both isotropic time and freedom of will and action. This impossibility can be forgiven, as time travel in Kindred is used to defamiliarize the past, describing it through the eyes of a homodiegetic female narrator who has much more in common with the implied reader than with the Afro-slave. average American. The story thus recreates the horrors of slavery in a way intended to shock an audience already numbed by countless stories and documentaries about slavery. However, this affect relies on Dana's depth and complexity, and it is therefore crucial that she is free to make her own choices on an ontological level, in at least one of the novel's fictional worlds. Thus, the modern chronotope of confined space and restricted multidirectional time, coupled with ontological freedom, shapes the characters as free beings who constantly struggle against the oppressive forces opposed to them. Dana and her husband Kevin do not wait with resignation for her sudden kidnappings in the past, but do everything possible to increase her chances of survival: Kevin provides Dana with a weapon – “On the side of me was a tote bag -all canvas. containing...the biggest switchblade I've ever seen" searches the local library and even travels with her to the past, and Dana supplies herself with medicine and a map of Maryland, and calls for help when she realizes that she cannot manage shopping alone. The second chronotope of the novel is the slavery chronotope, in which space is limited to the Weylin slave plantation, and time is linear. - the story advances in time from Rufus's early childhood until his death - and fragmented: the world is represented in discontinuous slices of time, delimited at the beginning by a moment when Rufus feels that his life is in danger, and at their end with a moment when Dana feels her life is threatened This fractured time creates fractured characters, as the narrator and reader only have access to isolated stages of their lives, with significant gaps between the two. . Dana first meets Margaret Weylin, for example, as an overprotective young mother who beats her child's savior. Dana meets her a second time four years later, and she is still overprotective, fiercely jealous and vindictive. However, when Dana meets her for the third and final time, Margaret is eleven years older and profoundly changed: vulnerable, weak and pathetic. Dana and the reader have difficulty accepting Margaret's change, because for Dana, only a few months have passed (including the time she spent in the past and the time she spent in the present), and for the reader, a single chapter. splits between Dana's previous encounter with Margaret and the current encounter. So, here we see an example of how science fiction projects narrative techniques from the extradiegetic to the diegetic level - narrative ellipses become actual ellipses inthe timeline of the fictional world – which create an affinity between Dana's time travel experience and the reader's reading experience. This in turn results in the deconstruction of fictional characters as unified entities that gradually evolve over time. All the characters in this world except Dana and Kevin are incomplete, and although Dana loves Carrie, hates Tom Weylin, and pities Alice Greenwood, her perception of them is discontinuous and she can never identify with them in the same way. fully in their relationships with each other. The chronotope of slavery brings us once again to the question of predestination. This problem manifests itself on two levels. At some level, whether the timeline of the fictional world is fixed or variable must remain ambiguous, in order for the story to maintain credibility and poignancy. If the fictional world were clearly deterministic, the preservation of Dana's ancestors would be ensured and she would likely abandon Rufus until his death, thus abruptly ending the story. Yet if the fictional world were openly subject to change, then the narrative would lose its raw power to depict Dana's attempts to instill modern moral values ​​in Rufus and to alleviate the suffering of the plantation slaves as a " game against history”, a struggle doomed to failure. At the end of the story, it is still unclear whether the timeline of the fictional world is fixed, in which case Dana has no choice but to save her ancestor, or rather whether it is open, in which case she is indeed saving her lineage and herself through it. endurance and ingenuity. This ambiguity is reinforced by the absence of any mention of Dana in the newspaper reporting Rufus' death - "I found nothing in the newspaper's incomplete archives to suggest that he had been murdered", thus suggesting that his disappearance was predetermined. , and it doesn't matter that Dana was the agent of death. At the second level, the novel extensively addresses the notion of socio-historical determinism: “how easily slaves are made”. It explores how the chronotope of slavery inevitably breeds slaves and slave owners. In other words, the issue at this level is not determinism resulting from logical paradoxes, but rather the extent to which human behavior is controlled by spatiality and temporality (chronotope). This question is dramatized through the process in which the chronotope of slavery inexorably destabilizes the identities of Dana and Kevin, as they are shaped by the modern chronotope – as liberal thinkers, modern writers, and loving and open lovers of 'mind - and reshapes them respectively as a slave and a slave owner who becomes an abolitionist. In this context, it is particularly telling that Dana's black skin color is only mentioned during her second trip to the past, three chapters into the novel, when Rufus states that her mother called her "just a nigger." It's almost as if she was a white woman in the fictional world structured around the modern chronotope, and it was the chronotope of slavery that suddenly blackened her. At this point, she is still confident enough in her modern identity to respond, "'I'm a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me anything other than my name, that's it.'" However, her attitude toward Rufus' derogatory language changes on his next trip, when Kevin wishes to reprimand him for exclaiming that "niggers can't marry white people!" ", but she puts "a hand on Kevin's arm just in time to stop him from saying anything." he would have said." In the same journey, Dana tries to affirm their otherness - "we were not reallyinvolved. We were observers watching a series...of poor actors. "We never really took our roles." but her words carry a certain degree of self-deception, since not long before, she had been vaguely ashamed when Tom Weylin had caught her leaving Kevin's room - “I almost felt like I was really doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner thus betraying that the chronotope of slavery has already begun to reshape his identity Even his attempt. teaching Nigel to read and write is a typical act of a rebellious slave, not a modern woman. Kevin's identity is also reshaped, as we can see in his statement that America is. 19th century "could be a great time to live in." 1976. So, at the end of this journey, Dana is willing to admit that “every now and then…I can’t keep the distance. I'm drawn back to eighteen nineteen." Dana's next trip into the past marks another step in the remaking of her identity through the chronotope of slavery. She now considers the plantation her home – " I was surprised to find myself wearily saying, “Home at last,” thus seriously calling into question the status of her home in 20th-century California. Moreover, while dining with Rufus, she says: “ I put down my cookie and mastered the part of my mind that I left in 1976." thus indicating that the change imposed on him by the chronotope of slavery is accelerated by his own self-formation. as as a slave, in order to alleviate his suffering in the harsh reality that surrounds him. This destabilization of Dana's identity is articulated in Tom Weylin's questioning: "Who are you?" he asked. “What are you?”… “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said. “My name is Dana, you know me. 'Don't tell me what I know!'"; in fact, by the time Dana returns from her fourth trip into the past, we no longer know who she is. This is even more true for Kevin: his identity has been so profoundly transformed by the chronotope of slavery during the five years he lived in the past, that he feels like a stranger in his own home and in his century the recasting of the characters by the two chronotopes of the novel. is embodied in the juxtaposition of Dana and Kevin's sexual encounters in the fictional world of 1976 California, and Rufus's attempted rape of Dana in the fictional world of mid-19th century Maryland after their return to the 20th century. , Dana insists that Kevin make love to her, despite his reluctance: “'Come to bed,' said Kevin... 'Come to bed with me.'... 'Come with me,' I repeated softly, 'Dana, you. 'Your back is hurt'… 'Please come with me.' He did it." (189-90). This act portrays Dana as a strong-willed young woman with a sexual appetite, who feels secure in her own body and confident enough to demand that her husband pleasure her. However, soon after, Dana returns to the past and is almost raped by Rufus, in the scene that marks the novel's climax. The opening moments of this scene depict a completely different Dana: apathetic, submissive and ready to abandon her body. the exploitation of a man who treats her like his slave. She initially demonstrates a gentleness that matches the insistence with which she implored Kevin to come to bed with her: "I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to stay quiet and to let him forgive even that. So easy,, 1927.