A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki has two very different speakers that alternate every chapter. The first is a young girl named Nao, who immediately tells whoever happens to find her journal that she plans on killing herself as soon as she has finished writing. Then, there is the author telling her own story and her reactions to Nao’s journal in a third person limited voice. I will be the first to admit that the author’s chapters are a cannonball chained to Nao’s chapters’ feet. So while my eyes glaze over her rambling on about her life, I started to notice how the chapters were structured. The narrator had mentioned how Nao’s entries were undated, so there was no real way of knowing exactly how much time was passing in between. However, she noticed certain clues: “the changing hues of ink, as well as shifts in the density or angle of handwriting, which seemed to indicate breaks in time or mood. If she studied these, she might be able to break up the diary into hypothetical intervals...and pace herself accordingly” (38). So as I forced my eyes over the story behind how she ended up living on some island in Canada I realized that the breaks she had made in Nao’s chapters likely corresponded with the breaks Ozeki noticed in the actual diary itself. Within each chapter are numbered section, and Nao’s sections are clearly separate entries, although each section usually references the one before or elaborates on something she touched on. Nao finishes one section saying “You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!” and then begins the next “Ugh. That was dumb” (4). Most of her sections directly respond to each other, and then each chapter she begins a new topic or story or just set of random thoughts that she needed to get down. I have found that its actually very similar to my own notebook I keep for class, where the piece I am actually working on gets interrupted from time to time by thoughts that need to make it onto the page.
Then, after a chapter of interesting thoughts and stories told from an active perspective, comes a chapter from the author. What I have noticed is that she tries to mimic the same structure that she gave to Nao’s entries. However, she never uses the same numbers of sections and her writing never seems to clearly lineup with Nao’s. She does continue her train of thought, similarly to how Nao does, but usually just elaborates on the last thought of the previous section. Occasionally she discusses Nao, but so far its just her own life. My personal preference would be if the sections actually related to Nao’s or lined up with them so it could be clear how the two chapters relate to each other, as opposed to just being back to back. However, this is not the case and I am just going to have to suffer through passive chapters before I can learn more about Nao’s fate.
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