Reconfiguring Narrative Time: Recursion, Fragmentation and Minimalism in Three Modern Novels

Abstract

Abstract

This study examines how modern fiction reconfigures narrative time. Through a comparative analysis of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2014), Lance Olsen’s Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007), it distinguishes three specific temporal configurations: recursive, fragmented and minimalist. The study explores how the selected works treat narrative coherence and how this reframes the readers’ intellectual engagement. Through a comparative narratological methodology, and close reading of the major texts and secondary resources, it examines how recursion destabilises progression, how fragmentation disrupts continuity and how minimalism intensifies temporal compression. The findings emphasise that time reconfiguration emerges not from a single technique but from multiple ones, each reshaping the cognitive experience of reading. The work is relevant to wider discussions of contemporary temporality since it shows that the narrative form can be used to demonstrate cultural concerns about the acceleration, fragmentation, and unstable nature of lived time.