The soul in Time’s Arrow: A post-Enlightenment presence

Abstract

The consensus among critics is that the narrator of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow is the suppressed moral consciousness of the protagonist, the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben. This critical opinion takes its cue from the notion of ‘doubling’ in Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors which Amis cites as the spur to writing the novella. Although this reading is persuasive, it does not quite account for the full characterization of the narrator, namely his ‘soul-like’ qualities. This article makes the case for the narrator as a ‘familiar compound ghost’ of Western philosophical and cultural accounts of the soul. Such a reading has wide implications for the novella’s account of the work of the Nazi doctors and Nazism more generally, and positions the novella within an anti-positivist line of post-Enlightenment thought.