Fragmented chronologies : the simulation of memory in Station Eleven and Bangkok Wakes to Rain : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English, School of Humanities Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Abstract

Non-linear narration within fiction innately encourages the reader to engage in the process of constructing a linear timeline of events in a text’s storyworld. This thesis is concerned with two contemporary novels that employ this narrative strategy – Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) and Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019) – and asks what effect the fragmented chronologies in these novels have on the reader’s understanding of key thematic concerns. My close analyses of these two novels are informed by existing critical discussions in narratology, philosophy, and psychology that focus on the representation of the human experience of time as portrayed within narrative. As it stands, current critical discussions of these novels rarely engage with this striking aspect of their narration, instead choosing to focus on their representations of anthropocentric apocalypse. I argue that this is a significant gap in existing research, which I seek to fill in this thesis. Via close readings and reconstructions of linear timelines for each of the two novels, I argue that both seek to simulate within the reader the experiences of time, memory, forgetfulness and trauma felt by the characters. As the reader seeks to construct their own linear timeline of events within each novel, they engage in a similar process of ‘sense-making’ as the characters do as they try to negotiate their own pasts. Thus, the experiences of recollection, amnesia, dissociation, revelation, and trauma are all felt simultaneously by the reader and characters, amplifying each novel’s key thematic concerns with memory and forgetting.