The Crisis of Self: Grief, Martyrdom & Solipsism in Time-Travel Narratives

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is comprised of a 60% creative component, for which I have written a 70,500-word work of science fiction, and a 40% critical thesis examining narrative devices employed throughout the subgenre to which my novel belongs: time-travel fiction. Written in a close third-person limited point of view, The Inventor — as its title suggests — focuses on the inventor rather than the invention, in contrast to early-twentieth-century narratives of its kind, such as H.G. Wells’s canonical The Time Machine (1895), which was subtitled “An Invention” in the original Holt edition. Set in New Zealand and rooted in family dynamics, The Inventor presents the future inventor of time-travel as a young man, battling with grief, struggling to invest himself in his current life and relationships, and fostering the destructive obstinacy he inherited from his deceased mother. He faces the crisis of criticising, defying and reclaiming the dead, and consequently revising his own philosophy. Finally, he must determine whether or not to heed his own advice, albeit the advice of an older, more experienced self. The novel explores the time-traveller’s motivations, and probes what lengths he will go to to achieve his goals.

In writing the book, I found that there were forces of genre holding sway on the narrative, and I discovered that various consistencies exist across the subgenre. Firstly, the time-traveller’s wish fulfillment is rarely realized — meaning that such stories tend to be wish-relinquishment narratives — or the protagonist is led towards an anti-climactic ending. Secondly, there comes a point at which the time-traveller is compelled to make a sacrifice or to perform an (often reluctant) act of altruism or martyrdom of which he would not have initially been capable. Thirdly, that time-travellers share certain characteristics of disposition and psychology, if not motivation.

Since many time-travel stories are based on contemporary theoretical physics, there are logistical and logical reasons for some of these commonalities; nonetheless, my 44,000-word critical thesis examines three of the most persuasive and effective tropes in time-travel fiction. The first chapter explores the use of time-travel as a mechanism for exploring grief, trauma and regret. Chapter Two considers the time-traveller as a reluctant altruist, martyr, or messiah (complete with God complexes). Chapter Three, “The Loneliness of Narcissus, Reflected in Time’s Stream”, examines narratives (such as that of The Inventor) in which the time-traveller confronts himself (time-travellers are predominantly male), and in which the traveller’s journey is ultimately towards the self. In this context, I demonstrate the narcissism, solipsism and loneliness of the time-traveller, and detail my own use and reformation of these tropes.