A Tale For Time Being Ruth Ozeki Summary

The literary function of a text within a text(intertextuality) in Ruth Ozeki’s ‘A Tale for the Time Being’
Ruth Ozeki is known for incorporating the topic of the jeopardising reality of our generation’s consumption of foul foods through her fictional characters in a form of a tale in her first novel My Year of Meats and her second novel All Over Creation, where she is critiqued as ‘isolating what must be one of the most strangest literary niches ever’1. She is also known for cohering two shores- Japan and America in respect of her Japanese-American heritage. Nevertheless, Ozeki’s third novel A Tale for the Time Being misaligns from her natural orbit by abandoning the topic of food and relocating the setting to a remote island in Canada. Moreover the novel is made partially autobiographical by the introduction of the character Ruth, a novelist.
A Tale for the Time Being is a novel about Ruth with writers’ block who happens to come across and gets heavily drawn into a diary washed up on one of the shores, written by a suicidal sixteen-year-old girl named Naoko- commonly referred to as Nao, who had lived in Japan.
The novel not only contains external sources, but also introduces a number of fictional books, letters, diaries and e-mails written by the characters, where the most important text in the novel is with no doubt the diary of Nao in which forms an alternating narrative between Ruth. The uncommon agglomeration of external texts in the fictional novel serves as a backbone for unfamiliar jargon, cultures or concepts for the audience to aid assimilation of the wide and in-depth subject matters that the novel convers, whereas the fictional texts composed by the author aids the flow of the