The heroes and the heroines of the medieval romances exist in a timeless world, and this is one of
the reasons why they seem so remote from us. Robinson Crusoe , on the other hand, immediately
goes and devices a calendar once he finds himself alone in his island. This action of the central
character in what is perhaps the first novel in English epitomizes right at the beginning of the
historical rise of the novel its quintessential difference from the timeless world of the old romances-
modern fiction is concerned with a presentation of events as they happen in time
and implies the existence of some kind of time scheme.
It is certainly one of the characteristics of a great writer that his work can bridge the ever-widening
gap between the date of composition and the date of reading by successive generations of
readers. He can achieve this by creating a strong illusion of immediacy and directness in the
reader’s mind of the events that are presented, even though they are described in the past tense.
This story illusion may in fact be so vivid that an impression of actual participation in the action is
conveyed.
To put it more concretely, someone may today be reading a novel written in the past tense about
events that took place on a certain day in the year 1789, and feel as though they were happening
now at this moment of reading, in his presence and presentness. ( A: A: MENDILOW, Time and
the Novel)
When the chronological past of the story’s action is thus translated into the fictive present
felt by the reader, the story illusion is complete- the reader is made to forget his own present and
sink himself into the fictive present of the story. Of course , all the elements of a work of fiction
have to contribute towards achieving this effect, but the writer’s handling of the time scheme of
the story plays an important part in it.
For E.M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel, there was a clock ticking away in every work
of fiction; some writers tried to follow this clock closely, others speeded it up or slowed it down;
some set the hands back or forward, but nobody was able to abolish the clock altogether. If we
apply this remark, which is generally accepted as valid in literary criticism, to the choices a writer
is faced with in selecting the time scheme of a narrative, we may say that he can choose between
three basic alternatives.
He can aim for a close correspondence of acting time and reading time, which is to say that
the events described are transacted in approximately the same time as it takes to read about
them. When acting time and reading time correspond in this way it is not normally possible to deal
with more than a single day in the lives of the characters, whereas many years may be allowed to
elapse between the beginning and the ending of a story if the writer has decided on
concentration and compression, contracting and summarizing time.
A third alternative is expansion of chronological time. Here the writer tries to catch the full impact
of a ‘moment of importance’ in which the whole of life at its most intense is enclosed;
