User blog comment:HumboldtLycanthrope/I am taking an online creative writing class taught by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk/@comment-26030957-20150905015234/@comment-26030957-20150905021039

Here's my homework if anybody is interested:

In chapter twelve of Donna Tart's The Gold Finch the protagonist Theodore is more or less trapped in a hotel room in Amsterdam without a passport. In his loneliness and despair he becomes increasingly suicidal and Ms. Tart uses a variety of means to express the passing of time and his growing state of anxiety and depression.

The chapters starts, “The days leading to Christmas were a blur, since thanks to illness and what amounted to solitary confinement I soon lost track of time.” Ms. Tart then uses the television as a means of showing time progression, saying that, “instead of providing even a false hum of normalcy [the television] only racketed-up the variform confusion and displacement: no logic, no structure, what was on next, you didn’t know, could be anything, Sesame Street in Dutch, Dutch people talking at a desk, more Dutch people talking at a desk, and though there was Sky News and CNN and BBC none of the local news was in English.”

She then uses food to show the progression of time: “Increasingly, my main contact with reality was room service, which I ordered up only in the blackest pre-dawn hours when the delivery boys were slow and sleepy. . .my Dutch rolls and coffee, my ham and eggs and chef’s assortment of Dutch cheeses.”

Gradually the prose begins to grow more hazy and confused: “I dreamed of snowy mountains, pure and terrifying.” Time becomes disjointed: “On Monday, or maybe it was Tuesday,” “A little while. What was a little while?” Until the “unbearable claustrophobia of the soul” reaches a point where “time didn’t exist or, more accurately existed all at once in every direction, all histories and movements occurring simultaneously.”