What is the essence of time but the perrenial river that stumbles past every pebble?

What difference would it make which way the river flowed? Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis is a manipulative novel. I mean this in a good way. (Isn’t it sad that some words are forever canonized into having a negative connotation?) The book starts off with a man in a hospital, paralyzed and unable to move. This is the point where most novels would decide to end the story. Man born, grows up, falls in love, makes futile attempts at procreation, and is paralyzed by the humiliation of his inability. However this is where his novel begins in reverse.

 A popular movie in recent times has been Memento which uses this concept to create an exceedingly well paced thriller about a man who at no point in time knows more than the viewer does. More so, Irreversible (a French movie) uses this same concept and toys with our sentiments about happy endings.

The book has a protagonist but the narrator isn’t the protagonist. One executes, the other refutes. From paralysis to well being, from love to unlove, and from death to life, this book dramatically questions our ability to understand the world around us as simply a sequence of events dictated by Time’s arrow. Sometimes I guess it doesn’t matter which way the arrow points.