Martin Amis Time's Arrow Sparknotes

In Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, the protagonist (if one may call Odilo a protagonist, or even ascertain exactly who is narrating the story) utilizes a first-person narrative voice to detail his life as it unwinds in reverse. The effect is often hilarious, the narrator—Tod’s soul or conscience, if it may be conjectured—epitomizing irony; an extremely limited perspective viewed by a less limited perspective. For instance, he describes the “beginning” of his career as a doctor as something “you don’t want to hear about…One night I got out of bed and drove—very badly—to an office. I then had a party with all of my new colleagues. At six o’clock I…donned a white coat and started work. What at? Doctoring!”(22) The irony is striking on multiple levels:
It illustrates an important point about the nature of moral judgments and understanding our surroundings. One who sees time unfold properly would see a doctor properly celebrating his retirement (and might rebuke him for driving drunk), or, given the backwards narration, the wherewithal to see that there’s something terribly wrong about drinking before doctoring. But from Tod’s conscience’s perspective, it is all simply arbitrary; he cannot distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, because things that happen seem to have arbitrary consequences. From the first-person voice, perspective is limited to the extent that moral judgments are impossible, and confusing when Tod attempts to confront them. With no grasp of empirical causes and effects, attempts at understanding the world are futile, and the narrator’s lack of comprehension is exacerbated by his first-person perspective. Amis switches the tense when Odilo “arrives” at Auschwitz to bring the narrator—and the reader—to a state of being able to comprehend cause and effect, the central premise necessary for assigning moral
Tod lights up his perfectos at all intervals of his life, and Amis pairs the perfecto with a properly alliterative adjective that is meant to represent how Tod is feeling at the time. The cigars are always “perfecto:” unchanging, constant, a barometer of how Tod really feels, regardless of how our narrator might be distorting reality. Odilo’s cigar is “penitent”(120) at Auschwitz, a bizarre choice of adjective for the given situation. Perhaps Amis is suggesting that the worst is over; the gruesome murder machine has been described, and the process of penitence has ‘begun’ for young Odilo. It could be, though, that this glimpse of omniscience is meant to cause the reader to question how much of the whole narrative is believable. Our narrator might describe the perfecto as penitent since he believes that Odilo is finally doing some good in his life. But the reader can step back and recognize that the adjective is horribly inapt. The contradiction between what a reader would ascribe to Amis (the first explanation) and to the narrator (the second) is precisely the point. The narrator can see the exact same thing as any observer at any given moment, but his inability to make judgments is shoved in the reader’s face. The perfecto, contradictory in its omnipresence and the narrator’s tendency to ascribe to it improper descriptions,