Hi(s)story Gone Wrong. Martin Amis on the Holocaust in Time‘s Arrow

Abstract

A historical novel told backwards, Martin Amis‘s Time‘s Arrow recycles the shared memories of the Holocaust, experiments with narrative representation and uses black irony throughout, in an attempt at healing the past and avenging the dead, while shedding a surgical light on the present and the living. The paper focuses on the aforementioned, analysing the way in which form supports content, and his story (that of a Nazi doctor) rewrites history (which emerges as a series of consecutive dystopias).