What I immediately noticed about Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is his use of kairotic time similar to what we had read in “The Albertine Notes”. However, unlike “The Albertine Notes,” the use of kairotic time is easier to follow in Zone One. There is no concept of chronological time in “The Albertine Notes”; instead days are marked by events such as before Albertine or after the blast. In Zone One, events still play a big role in marking time, but there is still a sense of chronology. Whitehead emphasizes the before and after by adding a sense of nostalgia of New York pre-apocalypse.
Tag Archives: The Albertine Notes
Thoughts on The Albertine Notes
The first thing that I noticed when I started reading “The Albertine Notes” was that time was measured kairotically. Time is not measured, but marked by events:
- Before Albertine
- After the blast
The use of kairotic time is justified by the fact that people want to hold on to their memories after an apocalyptic event. By using Albertine, they are able to hold on to memories and by doing so their perception of time becomes altered from chronologic to kairotic. Kevin knows the concept of chronological time (p. 158), but it seems that he no longer understands it. He cannot tell whether two days or two weeks have passed. Because no significant event had happened to mark the time, time has just simply passed without any kind of measurement.
