Time

I will divide the time in this text in two types: internal and external. For me, the term external time should be referred to the time that appears in the index of the text, in a structural organized way that could be compared with a curriculum vitae or a diary. It was the author’s propose to make it look like this (because when you are going to have a job interview, you must carry a curriculum vitae with you). The fact that the story is presented like this, gives not only shape but coherence and cohesion to the text.

Also it is important to mention that for an ordinary reader, it is difficult or almost impossible to see the connection between the periods of the external time that appear in the index. At first sight this time sequences can be understood in a way that she only wanted to separate her education and working experience (like any regular job applier), but in a closer reading we can see that she has only chosen her top selection of experiences and has ordered them by date and place.

So now we are going to look closer into external time and analyze the time that passes between the first date and the last one of the index, and also the ones that are in between. The first date that is shown is 1989 and the last one two years later (1991). It is important to notice that in the ones that are in between those two not only the year is shown, but also the moth. It could be understood in two ways: rather she wanted to be more precise on the working experiences she had (because she also adds the name of the companies that she seemed to have worked at) or that she only wanted to date the events she considered important.

The time period mention before is the following: The dates we find between those two years are:

· Agency for Artists, June 1989 - Aug. 1989

· Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Sept. 1989 - March 1990

Once we have analyzed the characteristics of external time, let’s have a look at the internal one. Here we are going to deal with the time that passes inside each story and rather it affects or not the storyline.

Internal time is flexible. As in some of the stories this type of time is clearly mention, in the others the pass of time is only shown through the emotions and actions of the storyteller. This kind of time setting is linked to hypertext creations, because in these types of texts there is no need of making a strict time-sequence because almost none of the stories are connected.

The examples of internal time vary from months, weeks, hours and minutes. But for Eisen, and also for the reader, internal time is not very important. It gives clues for linking together the incidents of the story, but it is not used for understanding the storyline. Here I have extracted all of the examples of internal time in this hypertext. As I already mentioned, some of them are very clear references while others are modulated into the storyteller’s personal perspective. The examples I found are the following:

The best example of internal time in this story is the chapter called Conceived of strategy to reorganize daily scheduling process. The name of this chapter says it all. Here, internal time is perfectly remarked and can be easily seen. The examples are: “at 5:00 a.m.”, “at 11 a.m.”, “I had an hour to kill before he would be back”. “When he got back”, “until the end of the next song”, “while”, “during one of my moments of incompetence”, “for after”, “When” and “Afterwards”.

Another clear examples of time sequences throughout the whole text are: “Over summer break”, “After three weeks”, “through the weekend”, “The next week”, “At first”, “again”, “After the close”, “At the end of the day”, “Before” and “after breakfast”. And finally, here are the internal time examples that are represented through the character’s physical perceptions “I had a longer looking”, “kept looking at” and “While we were flipping”.

To summarize, both of the time aspects I have analyzed in this paper have a relevant importance for the storyline itself because, as I mentioned before, the text is based on a sequence of feelings and emotions, and not on a sequence of time.