Day after day, year after year, events and occurances repeat themselves. Similar events will happen to different people at different times, or even the same person at a different time. The ties between these multiple situations cannot always be observed, but they still exist. In other examples, however, a person's mind will remind them immediately of another situation very similar to their present one. In this way, one could look at history as cyclical instead of linear. In Ceremony, there are many instances of a person repeating what he or she had done earlier or what another person had done. In the relating of many situations, Silko utilizes the events of the past as a way to connect the different characters and explain what is presently occurring. In one section of the novel, she explains that Tayo "had tossed the coins to them the way he had tossed them from the bridge in San Diego..." (Silko 114). Then, a little later, she says that Tayo "looked back at the bridge and he made a wish. The same wish Rocky made that night in San Diego: a safe return" (Silko 116). Not only does she tie Tayo with his past, but she connects him to the past of his cousin, Rocky.

There are so many more examples of this in fictional literature, as well as nonfictional events. In Maus, the page dedicated to explaining the reccuring blessing of freedom and happiness on "Parsha Truma," a Jewish holy day, for Vladek is just one of these examples (Spiegelman I,59). Also, Spiegelman relates the details of his father's, Vladek's, life to emphasize this repitition of life. Vladek counts bread and cigarettes and money in the concentration camps, then counts pills and sorts nails years after. By examining another's life, such as Vladek's, one can recognize this repititition in life objectively. Vladek and the other Jews are constantly hiding from the guards. Vladek even tells Art to run from the guards at the hotel near Vladek's home: "In this way the hotel guard can't see us..." (Spiegelman II,36).

Time does not only conduct itself in a cyclical fashion in one person's life, but it also is evident throughout history. Art's wife comments to Vladek, "You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about the Jews!" (Spiegelman II,99). This highlights the same feelings being felt by two different groups of people aobut two different other groups of people at different times. In conversation today, a person will hear comments like, "This will lead to another Holocaust," or "This is the start of World War III." These comments illustrate our own need to relate current events with the past. Vladek does this as well, for he relates the shooting of a human in a concetration camp march with that of a dog who was shot when he was young: "...How amazing it is that a human being reacts the same like this neighbor's dog" (Spiegelman II,82). As simple as this may seem, the more complex idea of major events reflecting each other is just as true.

In Beloved, both of these ways of events repeating themselves occur. One of Denver's strongest memories is of her mother "cutting off her head every night" (Morrison 206). Sether was only brushing her hair, but to Denver, it was a fear that kept replaying itself over and again in her life. However, this is not the only repetition played out through Beloved. What happens in Beloved is repeated in Maus. Both based on true stories, events in time repeat themselves: a mother attempts (in one case, she is successful) to kill herself and her children in order to bring them all to a safer place. Sethe's story is based on an actual event where a woman was only successful in killing one of her children, although "her plan was always that they would all be together on the other side, forever" (Morrison 241). In Maus, Tosha, Vladek's sister, killed herself and the three children who were in her charge:

The return to slavery and the gas chambers was understood as a fate worse than death because it allowed someone else to kill you. The only loving alternative for both of these women was death. The determination and sadness touched with love that can be observed on Tosha's face in these frames could easily be imaged onto Sethe's face as she ran to the woodshed with her young children, fleeing the slaveowner coming to take them back. Still, we must remember that these events occurred at different times, indifferent places with no knowledge of one another.

The sign on this bus reads "for Jews; for non-Jews" in both Polish and German.

This bus boycott occurred in Montgomery because of the segregated bus system.

The Native Americans went through a struggle that was later felt by the Jews in Hitler's Germany and even by the blacks and slaves in America. The photos of the Jewish segregation are almost identical to what occurred with the blacks in America. The emotional responses to the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki could easily apply to the Holocaust, as well. The same things are going on in the world today as were fifty years ago; only today, they are slightly different.