In Something Happened, the hands of time just keep on spinning. Everything is cyclical: work is cyclical; unhappiness is cyclical; even death is cyclical. People die, are filed away, forgotten, and replaced by others. Rinse, recycle, and repeat.
At the end of the novel, when the something we've been waiting for finally happens, even the unprecedented tragedy does not seem to stop time. Slocum returns to work, and others press on as if nothing has happened. Time marches forward, and everyone goes along with it.
Questions About Time
- Which people and events in Slocum's life constitute a break in the monotonous cycle of time?
- Why does Slocum revisit times of the past? What does the Slocum of the present have to learn from these moments in time?
- What role does time play in Slocum's views of the future?
Chew on This
Time is a force that has been cruel to Slocum and those around him. People are powerless in the face of time: it ages people, sucks the life out of them, moves forward, and prevents everyone from pausing to mourn their losses.
Slocum rearranges and manipulates time freely in order to best construct the events from his past that have shaped the person he is today.