Time and Temporality

Readers may be able to glean from its title that "Afterward" is a story that is primarily concerned with the supernatural as it relates to time and temporality. While it is a ghost story in the traditional sense, "Afterward" is unique in that its ghostliness comes not from the intervention of supernatural figures per se, but instead from the way the story manipulates and engages with the passage of time. From the very beginning, the narrator sets up the story to be one that treats time as a fluid rather than linear concept: the story begins with Mary Boyne standing in her library reflecting on a conversation she had had six months earlier with her cousin. The story then flashes back to that conversation, only to return to Mary in the library and continue linearly – but with other flashback interruptions – from there. The effect...