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In his inquiry into different conceptualizations of time, Christopher Dewdney raises a question about how we, as individuals, might hope to reconcile the fact that "our collective sense of the present, the one we all agree upon, is not the same as our private sense of now'" (10). Our experiences of time are deeply personal even while they are tied to social life. The tensions that can arise between these different layers of temporality lead to what Daniel Coleman describes as a sometimes fraught negotiation of our conceptual images of time, or chronotopes: "We construct chronotopes in an ongoing dialogue between individual and collective experience, and much of our personal sense of belonging has to do with the fit between our individual time-space maps and those of the communities in which we live" (231). This matter of "fit," as well as the articulation of different temporal structures themselves, is intimately connected with our everyday use of narrative. In his seminal study Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur asserts that "time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative" (1: 3), and that narrative itself is the only thing which allows us to take "the subject of an action, so designated by his, her, or its proper name, as the same throughout a life that stretches from birth to death" (3: 246). The perception of any constant identity or relationship is possible only through the perception of continuity, the perception that past events are related to present and future events, and that one moment in time can be understood in terms of another. The upshot is that our distinctive experiences of time, which are shaped largely through social relations and tensions, equate very closely to our distinctive identities. Thinking through the complexities of subjective time-a task to which thoughtful literary narratives are especially well suited-allows us to understand how subjective time is shaped by and lies in tension with, broader forms of social and temporal relations.
In this article I offer two case studies on the above concerns by reading the tensions between subjective time and sociality in Gabrielle Roy's short story cycle The Road Past Altamont (La route d'Altamont, 1966) and Catherine Bush's novel Minus Time (1993). While...