And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

Even when we do not have a real conscience to rely upon, to confront reality, we know what defines us in this world, in our essence, in our mind and outside it. We could say “It’s our mortality that defines us”, as someone once said – but what is mortality if not an expression and finalization of time? Even an absence of time, in some ways.
Then it is time. It always has been.
Our life is ticking at the pace of the advancing time, following its relentless arrow. We are very linear beings: for us, it is inconceivable to think in a multidirectional time reality, to look at the sides of that arrow course, above and below it, not only behind and beyond. The movement of time and its perception defines us and we cannot escape this simple statement.
The centrality of time in our lives is crucial, at the point that Stephen Hawking uses the matter of having or not having a beginning for the time to prove the existence of a god or denying it. The paramount importance of time is permeating our philosophy, our behavior, our beliefs.

When it comes down to tell a story, despite our simple and unilateral direction in our travel through time, the course of events could be subverted to the capricious desires of the narrator – in an attempt to explore what our lack of perception hides from us. This will to embrace the unknown lead us to a non-linear narrative as a way, maybe, to understand better our deep connection with time and consequently ourselves.
This is a very deep and vast topic, so I will briefly touch it, with the example of four different authors, divided by time and space too.


[This digression contains spoilers… since now it seems that it is proper to say]



Homer
I will begin with Homer – because it is always the case to begin with him. The idea of beginning all his narrative in media res, right in the middle, is the perfect choice to create the sense of a great story. Think about it: it is rare to acknowledge of a story that is right at the beginning and it is mostly something tied to religion lore. Everyone and everything have a backstory, which nobody knows in all the details. To start with a middle placement is not only smart but realistic too.
After we are introduced to the story, we mark our place in the timeline and we try to settle down, but we do know that a character as Odysseus is one that comes with a very noticeable backstory, so we are ready for a ride.
At the beginning of the “Odyssey”, he is blocked in the Ogygia island, for reasons not fully explained, which will emerge later. It is important to know that most of his story is revealed when Alcinous, the king of Phaeax (where Odysseus found shelter after leaving the exile), almost begs him to tell his tale. A magical, strong link is now connecting all the parts of the story into the main character, merging past, present and future in a single person. The sense of legend, the lore behind Odysseus, is now re-connected with the present figure we know as a human being. We do know well how this solid mechanism works: we lived it when our grandfather told us World War II stories, suddenly catapulting a familiar figure we knew since we were babies and we currently know as an old man, into a vast, historical and almost legendary global landscape.
And, oh, what a master was Homer in that. He rightfully invented the cliffhanger, when telling the actual end of the “Iliad” in the “Odyssey”, as a remembrance; he consequently invented the sequel, as the “Iliad” is finally finding its coda in the words of the narrating Odysseus; he invented the spin-off, as the “Odyssey” could be considered the story of a secondary character of the “Iliad”; he cleverly left the finale of the “Odyssey” open, as we know that Odysseus needs to fulfill his oath to Poseidon and thus is leaving us with another, great adventure yet to be told (despite what Dante Alighieri tried to suggest us in his masterpiece).
One last glimpse of what makes “The Odyssey” a special story about time and memory, is the moment Odysseus decides to hear the song from the sirens. We all know that part… but it is not known what the song of the sirens was really about. Some scholars implies sirens can tell all the story of a man by heart and see and know everything in the world. Did Odysseus already know how his story would end, then, bending the rules of his own linear timeline? He certainly didn’t tell, making it one of the most intriguing mysteries of the “Odyssey”.
Aside from all of that, the “Odyssey” still is a perfect example of classical proportion for an early non-linear narration. We do believe that this kind of approach is a relatively modern one, but it is not. We can say it is the way a very inspired story-teller will use if he is very brave or very good at playing with time and our perception of it.

Faulkner
William Faulkner massively used the non-linear approach in “The Sound and the Fury”, which is really a tale about how time works, what its influence our lives and why it defines us. Speckles of events with a meaningful connection with a character are clustered in a single day, and those days fixed in different times, we could say different ages. There is no continuity in narration as there is no continuity in our memory, really. We remember about something that happened when we were 4 and right after a free association leads us to yesterday’s supper or to what our friend told us two years ago about something else. The memory works as a record player stylus, which is randomly flying on a spinning vinyl, engraved with our moments and missing any index. The circular movement it is only a suggestion. The process of placing and giving meaning to those memories is what makes the memory such a good place to enjoy.
The whole concept of what times mean to us is reflected in the title of the novel, which is getting Shakespeare in the mix. Is a quote from Macbeth, where the king drily decides that time means only to us because without it we are nothing and without us, nobody can tell if time is nothing itself:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Vonnegut
The use of a non-linear narrative process is at the core of “Slaughterhouse-Five”, from Kurt Vonnegut. Using an alien abduction as a plot device, the main character is now kicked out from the ordinary space and time continuum after being altered by them. For him the whole concept of linear time is now devoid of any meaning. As a result, he stops to care about and slides into apathy, an acceptance of his fate. As the arrow of time loses its own direction, the human being is lost with it. The experiences are not important anymore, as they are not really part of the memory anymore – nothing but loose pieces, fragmented and scattered all around. Finding himself as a fresh recruit into the terrible wartime in Dresden is not important anymore to him, as he is there now, actually living it without realizing it is the past. He cannot tell the importance the moment will have, as he cannot tell the future apart now. Thus, we know that the inability of the inner self of the present to index the memories of the past is the broken link that leaves us lost forever.
The reader himself starts to lose interest in what is happening to the character in the present. He actually starts to realize, with the uttermost terror, that there is no present, not really. Kurt Vonnegut mastery in dismissing any possible crave for information, to renounce to the plot twist or to any revelation, teaching an important lesson to any storyteller of today. The message is the story, not something inside it.
In “Slaughterhouse n.5” we do know what will happen to the character in the future because we already went there. This is the importance of time and memory: are the experiences of the past less important if we know the outcomes of the future they brought?

Sapkowski
Thus, we reach one of the modern master of this technique Andrzej Sapkowski, the author of “The Witcher” saga. He makes a wide use of the non-linear narration, often revealing the fate of his characters long before the reader can start to figure it out, through clever fake quoting of self-invented pseudobiblia and accounts from minstrels and historians or more directly, via small chapters set in the future.
In “The Lady of the Lake”, which closes the saga, he makes a wide use of flashforwards. Andrzej often creates a large volume of tension by placing the characters in a dangerous situation, while momentarily breaking it giving us an insight of their future, sad or happy that it may be, then coming back at them in the present. This is creating a strong bond through an artificially accelerated time frame, that makes us be close to them by knowing all the moments in life that matter to them and then, their ultimate fate. The case of Rusty, Shani and Iola is the most exemplary one.
Rusty is the master surgeon and healer, who is using the young and unexperienced Shani and Iola to help him to keep the wounded soldiers alive in the medical camp of a huge and bloody battle. The three of them start to know each other, winning their fears, the revulsion, the immense stress of saving or condemning a life, thus overcoming their own limitations and, sometime, finding a new purpose in life. Then we jump into the future, where Iola and Rusty die horribly because of a virulent pestilence they wanted to fight off in another city. Then again, we jump in a further future to see what happened to the third of them, Shani. She is old, a dean of study in a major medical academy, revered by every healer in the country. The character is known for the quote “Stitch red to red and white to white and everything will be alright,” but we know that the very quote is coming from her old master Rusty, spoken on that fatal day on the war medical camp that Andrzej left suspended in time – the day Shani won her doubts and fear and realized she wanted to be a healer for life.
We are deeply touched as the old Shani, it is said, sometimes can be seen to weep when saying that signature phrase “nobody knows why”.
But oh, we do.

To close the circle of the quote I used to open, we have some wisdom from Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek fame, who is applying so well to what the non-linear narration is trying to convey us by juggling with our very linear nature of human being:

Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we lived.