Readers and critics have unanimously recognized that the substance of Hubert Aquin's Prochain Episode is governed by the vertical superposition of two different, but mutually qualifying, temporal movements: one related to the real world of the clinic where the narrator is incarcerated and kept under strict surveillance and the other to the world created in his own mind. Also unanimously agreed upon is that the narrator-prisoner, who is waiting for the date of his case in court and sentence, commits his thoughts to paper in order to beguile present time and thus escape the psychological disintegration caused by prolonged suspense. While these observations are accurate, a closer analysis of Aquin's text indicates that the prisoner's act of writing is not motivated by one reason only but rather by a complex of reasons. Outstanding among them is the fact that, deprived of an authentic future in the absence of...