A clock is the most prominent image most people have of time. It measures experiences andevents chronologically. However, in memories, in a person's thought-world, "thoughts become entangled" (Silko 7). Time is not linear. Silko thouroughly examines and exhibits this ntion through Tayo's life in Ceremony. She states, "He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distance and time" (Silko 246). Although Silko relates her story chronologically, she allows the reader to enter the mind of her characters, especially Tayo, and experience life as he sees it, switching from one scene to another. At one point, Tayo had to "touch his own hand to remember what year it was: thick welted scars from the shattered bottle glass" (Silko 139). It was only through his scars that he remembered where he was. In another instance, Tayo sees Emo, then Emo becomes "the little Japanese boy" at the train station (Silko 62). In each of these situations, the switch in scene follows a deep interaction with the thought-world and the mind. He is sometimes deeps in thought and isolated inside of himself in that way or possibly drunk. Several times Tayo also experiences this confusion when he first wakes up: "for an instant he was waking up years before, on a nameless island in the Pacific" or "he woke up choking on humid jungle air, but when he pushed back the blanket he was in the cave" (Silko 198 and 235).

This also takes place in Beloved. Sethe explains the world of thoughts to Denver through the idea of rememory. She says:

"Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no... The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there- you who was never there- if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there waiting for you." (Morrison 36)

After understanding this, one can observe how this occurs throughout the novel. The time and situation is not chronological, for it is based on the thoughts and stories of the characters. In one instance, Morrison tells us that "Denver was seeing it now and feeling it" (Morrison 78). The story that was being told by Sethe came alive and transfered their minds to that place in time.

In Maus, too, a similar phenomenon occurs. Art becomes overwhelmed by everything that is occuring in his own life and everything that he is attempting to digest to write about concerning the Holocaust. At the beginning of the chapter "Time Flies," Art lists events in no particular chronological order, simply as his mind recalls them:

(Spiegelman II, 41). This is the one display of his difficult struggle in writing Maus in chronological order. The last sentence spoken by Art truly sums up his difficulty. When events that occurred thirty years ago reoccur in a person's life to the same degree as events that occurred yesterday, it can be depressing. Every time his father spoke, it was not in chronological order, and Vladek's own mind, as everyone's, wanted to relate the past through relations, not chronology. It is a struggle tht many people deal with throughout their lives, the separation of history, situations told through facts in a chronological order, and memory, situations told through experience with no regard to the chronology of time.