Humans are beings of society, people based on communication, for without that, there would be no society. They need to relate to each other using the most natural method, speech. Many people use speech as a way of solving their problems and dealing with their emotions. However, the one primary purpose of speech that might set the human race apart from other animals is our ability and need to tell stories. It is through these stories that humanity learns and lives. These stories are not told as they are written in books. They do not start at a beginning and then end promtly. Instead, the stories are brought on by the events of the present. They are told when needed to help a person's life. Therefore, the stories will not be linear. They will be told as needed, with a story about yesterday to relate what is occuring today, needing a story about five years ago to explain what happened yesterday, and possibly a link in that story to something that struck the person a month ago. It varies from day to day and from story to story.

With slavery and the Holocaust, stories passed along orally will never appear as linear. Tomoko Yamakazi explores this idea as true in Indian literature, as well, in Ceremony. The destruction of the past and oral tradition of a people by an outside force, the Whites, causes an even greater need to remember and pass along the stories of the people. Through this passing down of the oral history, the history remains alive; it is as relevant for the present age as it was for a people living a hundred years ago. Because it is the oral tradition of the people, it is not confined to any time, but exists in all times. Many people take the oral stories and rearrange them so that they will fit in a linear timeline, but it cannot be easy. Toni Morrison does not even attempt to arrange an individual's personal understanding of history chronologically in Beloved. Instead, she allows the narrative to be told as the different characters are experiencing it, which often means learning about the present before the past is understood. This type of arrangement in literature causes many headaches among those who would like to understand exactly what happened when.

Art Spiegelman expresses this frustration in Maus when he is trying to outline his father's time spent in Auschwitz and the exact amounts of time, measured linearly, are not important to his father: "But wait! That would be 12 months, you said you were there a total of 10!" (Spiegelman II,68). At one point, Art even cries out, "Wait! Please, Dad. If you don't keep your story chronological, I'll never get it straight..." (Spiegelman I, 82). Although each person's own mind and memory functions without an chronological order, it seems hard for people to grasp other's lives without organization. There lies the struggle between history, the facts of a situation told in chronological order, and memory, the emotions and feelings of a situation communicated in any order without regard to chronology.