If we want to do an
analysis
from the perspective of time, the first thing we should do, is distinguish
between objective time and real time.
For the first one the
first
thing we should do is try to look for any time expression that appear in the
text.
There are plenty of them,
there is usually at least one in each “page”, otherwise, because of the
non-hierarchical and non-sequentional distribution of the text, it would be
really difficult to know were we are.
The story starts with this
interesting sentence “It
doesn’t seem so long ago”, with give us the clue that the whole story is
going to be in the past, and with the verb “seem” it plays a bit, since it
happened a long time ago, although it is really clear in the character’s
mind,
but in spite of that is really difficult to situate the story in any
historical
period because the is no reference to years, but we can find temporary
references like August,
warm humid fourth
of July
night, so very long
ago, late one night in
March, late afternoon, afternoon, in the morning, every morning, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, December, Wednesday, summer, September, a cold October
night etc. And also phases and adverbs such
as no longer, still, always, when, while, usually, suddenly, occasionally, slowly, in a few minutes, , repeatedly, never, continuously, constantly simultaneously, for several days, all day, soon, all night, already, until, instantaneously, late…
I would like to point
out the
importance of usually and always when we are talking about
habits
and repeated action.
Giving us references like
July, August, September, December, we can deduce that the story lasts
about a
couple of months, although it is not specified in the
text.
The verbs also play a very
important role here, since depending on the form, they can express present,
past or future.
The past simple and
continuous are the commonest verb form in the text, since the real time
of the
text is the past.
The present simple is
hardly
ever used, but we can find it in dialogs, which are no so frequent, but
the are
a few of them along the text.
The present perfect
and the
past perfect appear when the action occurred in the past, but has
consequences
in the present.
I want to point out the
importance of the verb remember,
that have to do a lot with time, because it implies a certain reference
to a past
“more past” than the time of the story itself. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]…
To finish with, I would
remark the importance of a letter,
which does not belong to the “objective time”.
On the other hand, I have
spoken about real time, with is the time, I have personally spent in reading
the text and doing the whole paper.
When I read the text
for the
first time I spent around an hour and a half, but the second one was
much more
….
And then, I guess I have
spent around five hours in total.