Comparing Time In Lake Of The Woods And Cunningham's The Hours
910 Words4 Pages
One speculation from Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams, in which there is a fixed future, effectively explains how O’Brien’s In Lake of the Woods and Cunningham’s The Hours use time in a comparable way to prove that time is absolute. In both pieces, definite time is central in order to resonate with the final fate of each character. In In the Lake of the Woods, the past is reoccurring, coming back to haunt John Wade even after he tries to hinder its efforts. Changing his paperwork to erase his involvement in the Charlie Company was one such way the Sorcerer tried to manipulate the past in order to change his future. These efforts prove to be fruitless because the future is fixed, he will never be elected into the U.S Senate. The mysterious end to the story will never be revealed, different theories frozen in time. His wife, Kathy will always disappear after his scene in the middle of the night screaming “KILL JESUS KILL JESUS” while boiling water. Whether she sped over the lake too quickly and had been tossed into the lake, or she stumbled into the woods, getting very lost. It…show more content… He’s been running away from the truth, suppressing the fact that his father commit suicide from himself with cheap deception. His grief was channeled into his magic, but this method proved fruitless. No matter what he does, he cannot change the fact that his father killed himself. Time is “like a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past”(125), so each event is forever untouchable. His father committed suicide and no matter what great magic act the Sorcerer manages to pull off, he can’t change the course of what had happened. This knowledge increases the purpose of the work as a whole because the fact that this will never change, resonates within John Wade at the