Time has to end

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Time must end is a large-scale novel by the English writer Aldous Huxley . The novel was first published in 1944 under the English title "Time must have a stop". The title of the novel corresponds to the basic theme of the book, which is based on a passage from a work by William Shakespeare .

Main characters of the novel

Sebastian Barnack : An immature 17-year-old, blessed with ingenious gifts, who had to grow up in a problem family without parental love and care. His special passion is poetry, for which he brings with him an ingenious gift of inspiration. The poetic passion overcomes him again and again with such power that he devises lyrical paraphrases and poems in the course of the actions, even if the circumstances are often inappropriate. He is an adolescent of great sensitivity and shyness, who is overwhelmed by real situations over and over again.

Eustache Barnack : He is Sebastian's uncle and, unlike his brother John - Sebastian's father - stopped his political career at the beginning. By marrying a rich woman, he was able to devote himself entirely to the finer things in life. He is a connoisseur who is almost exclusively interested in sensual enjoyment. He has style, is an art collector and thinks it's stupid to give life to ideas. He is basically a 'passive' nihilist because he rejects all metaphysics and, as he himself admits, does not have enough energy to chase ideals or (as he says) 'spiritual vertebrates'.

Bruno Rontini : A bookseller with an unexpected inner life. At first glance, seeming inconspicuous, the eyes reveal that this person has found inner peace - peace with God. He has the gift of being able to look people into the soul, of which he bears witness several times. Basically he fulfills the role of the wise man in the novel, the 'unrecognized' wise man who fills everyone who meets him with the light of knowledge.

Secondary characters

  • The Queen Mother : She is a very old, blind woman who enjoys being the center of attention at the end of her life. She tyrannizes her environment and uses every opportunity to make life difficult for her fellow human beings. She is unjust and cruel, but is afraid of the approaching end. Therefore it holds as often as possible seances from.
  • Veronica Thwale : She is the Queen Mother's valet . Behind the facade of a highly decent woman, she hides her secret desire to watch people perform immoral acts and sufferings. She makes intrigues to deliberately create those situations that she pleases. In addition to that, she seeks to belong to better society at all costs. While the Queen Mother is openly malicious, she also adds insidiousness and unscrupulousness .
  • Daisy Ockham : She is always ready to believe in what is good in people, but she takes refuge in superficial philanthropism . She suppresses any thoughts of her own hatred and aversion to people, which, however, make itself felt indirectly in her: she mentions loved ones with the addition of 'the very dear', rejected ones with the addition of 'the poor, dear'. She is soft and eaten away by compassion for people, whom she can hardly refuse. She lost her only, adored son and sees in Sebastian an incarnation of this prodigal son.
  • Susan Poulshot : She is the childhood friend of Sebastian, who spent their childhood together with him. She is secretly in love with Sebastian, but is unable to confess this truth to him. She supports him secretly and secretly, but she suspects that her love will not be returned.
  • John Barnack : Sebastian's father is a political ascetic who has subordinated his entire life to the ideals he fights for. He bullies his son and his family through his absolute loyalty to his ideals and to his political work. He is adamant in his outlook on life and admits of no other opinion than his own. He secretly suffers from the loss of his wife, who left him precisely because of this inexorability.

Main theme

The main theme of the book precedes the actual plot. There are three verses by William Shakespeare , the meaning of which is explained in the epilogue of the novel. They are:

“But thinking is life's slave, life is the fool of time; and time, which the whole world looks at in measurement, must end. "

action

The novel begins with an encounter between Sebastian and his unknown aunt Daisy Ockham. The two meet by chance in a library. Daisy recognizes in him an image of her tragically deceased son, whom she loved more than anything. After this encounter, Sebastian goes alone through the city, letting his poetic imagination run wild. He wants to pick up his childhood friend Susan from her piano teacher and becomes the victim of a rough joke by this piano teacher. The extremely vulnerable Sebastian runs away injured and is followed by Susan, who is secretly in love with him, and who finally cheers him up. Together they go to their common home, because Sebastian grows up in his aunt's family, because his father is often traveling and neglecting him.

On the way, Sebastian receives an invitation to a party, which he initially does not want to accept because he is ashamed of having to go without proper evening clothes, 'which everyone else has, just not him'. He plans to ask his father for the money for such a suit, although he believes he knows that his father is strongly against it because of his attitude towards life. Sebastian spontaneously goes to his father's house, where he has no opportunity to express his request - everything else is more important to his father than the needs of his own son. It becomes clear that the father is not only against it because of his attitude to life, but deliberately withholds these and other wishes from him - because Sebastian is similar to his mother, who left John, which he did not get over.

Back at the house of his foster parents, the company has dinner together. Sebastian's uncle, the bon vivant Eustache, who has not been there for a long time, wants to receive Sebastian soon in his house in Florence. At dinner the family relationships and the different characters become clear: the foster father Fred Poulshot is a curmudgeon who deliberately spoils his family's joie de vivre with his gloomy moods, the aunt is a dutiful but narrow-minded woman, the son Jim is a simpleton. After dinner, John appears and fights with his brother Eustache because his attitude goes against the grain. Eustache counters calmly and the mood heats up. It is precisely under these unfavorable circumstances that Sebastian makes his request, which is brusquely rejected by his father. Susan secretly comforts him in his suffering.

The next chapters take place in Florence and shed light on the life of the art collector and idler Eustache, who on the drive into town talks to the somewhat seedy Mrs. Thwale, the maid of the Queen Mother who has come to his house. Eustache wants to meet his friend and distant relative Bruno Rontini. First, however, he acquires some nude drawings from Degas, which the art dealer ... offers him. At lunch the bon vivant meets Paul de Vries, a naive, spiritual person who sees it as his life's task to build bridges between the various sciences by creating a unified theory of all phenomena. He finds out through De Vries' slip of the tongue that he is interested in Mrs Thwale. In the course of the afternoon Eustache finally meets Bruno Rontini, who thinks he sees something in his face and warns him to give up his idle life 'before it is too late'. Rontini makes some profound remarks, the sense of which Eustache suspects, but whose consequences he ignores. But it becomes apparent that Eustache - contrary to what was initially believed - has a guilty conscience about some events in his past life. Because he is unable to completely reject a woman who used to be passionately loved by him, who has now become ill and lost her former beauty. On the way to a visit with her, however, he meets a younger woman with whom he had an affair every now and then, and lies to his former love again.

Sebastian now arrives in Florence, and Bruno Rontini is also present with Eustache when he arrives. But Eustache, outraged by Rontini's attempt to get him to rethink, manipulates the easily influenced Sebastian in such a way that Rontini doesn't listen. An evening at Eustache's house follows, during which Sebastian feels taken seriously for the first time. In an exuberance of emotions, Eustache gives him a drawing by Degas. The evening ends in disaster. While Sebastian falls asleep slightly drunk, Eustache suffers a heart attack in the toilet and dies. His death is only noticed the next morning when Sebastian pursues his poetic inclinations in the garden of the house.

The following chapters alternately illuminate, on the one hand, the further events in the house and, on the other hand, the ghost existence of the deceased Eustache, who sporadically regains his physicality in repeated seances. Sebastian acts rashly and takes the Degas given to him by Eustache - which is observed by Mrs. Thwale - and sells it to the art dealer, who offers him far less than the purchase price. Soon after the funeral, the sole heiress - Mrs. Ockham - arrives and brings her legal counsel, Mr. Thenning, a petty pedant who immediately makes an extensive inventory of the art treasures of the house. It is discovered that Degas is missing. The wicked Queen Mother takes this as an opportunity to immediately accuse the servants of theft, and Sebastian, who could clear up the matter, remains silent out of cowardice.

He now realizes that nobody would believe that Eustache gave him Degas as a present. The insidious Mrs. Thwale directs suspicion on an innocent servant girl. With this she morally blackmails Sebastian and sleeps with him a short time later, even though De Vries proposed marriage to her on the same day. Sebastian happens to find a letter from Rontini the next morning and plans to ask him for help: Degas has to be retrieved and brought back so that everything looks as if no one has stolen it. Rontini agrees to help him and with difficulty gets the Degas back from the art dealer Mr. Greuil. In return he gives Rontini the promise to clarify the truth to Mrs. Ockham. Everything goes well because Mr. Greuil actively helps to explain the temporary disappearance of the drawing, but Sebastian breaks his word given to Rontini out of weakness and does not tell Mrs. Ockham either. Instead, Rontini is arrested in the presence of Sebastian, based on a boastful remark Sebastian made earlier. When Sebastian returns to the house, dismayed, the servants poisoned the queen mother's lap dog in revenge for the unjust suspicion against the girl. Now Sebastian sees what he has done through his lying and his weakness. The main story closes with Sebastian being called back prematurely by his father. Because his tailor-made suit won't be finished until later, it was all in vain and Sebastian didn't take a lot of guilt for anything.

The epilogue is told from the perspective of the aged Sebastian, who became a poet and whose life developed as Rontini had foreseen. He tells of his recent encounter with Rontini, who is terminally ill. Sebastian takes self-sacrificing care of the person who still has a lasting influence on him in the last days of his life. A large part of the epilogue consists of the collected notes of Sebastian. At the very end, he at least partially reconciles with his aged father.

literature

  • Aldous Huxley: Time has to end. Roman ("Time must have a stop"). Piper, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-492-11046-0 .
  • Aldous Huxley: Time must have a stop . Dalkey Archive Press, Normal, Il. 2001, ISBN 1-564-78180-1 (reprint of the London 1944 edition).