"Juice" Response

Possible philosophical theme of “Juice”: Staying in the same place and going on forever have the same end: you never end up anywhere.

When I began reading Juice the second thing that puzzled me, with the title being the first, was the quote at the beginning referencing how time has lost its temporality in modern literature and that nothing gets done anymore. After reading the novel in its entirety I find that this quote is a good comment on the philosophical nature of the novel in regards to time. In the first story of the novel, “Proportion Surviving”, the narrator is stuck in the past. Nothing is getting done in their life. They are inert in the passage of time and subsequently the events that they could be acting on. They have the opportunity to venture over the mountain and possibly find life, but they choose to stay where they are at. They are also fixated on the time it has been since the exodus of the people, emphasizing there fixation on past time. In the last story of the novel, “Sleep”, something similar but also opposite occurs. The narrator does seem fixated on time, but not on the past, the future. The narrator comments on how quickly time has passed and comments looks constantly toward the future. However, just like the first narrative, it does not seem like much is getting done by the narrator. The passage is very disjointed. Ideas in the paragraphs abruptly change, following no apparent structure or logic. This limits the story’s coherence and the reliability of the narrator, as the narrator seems very disconnected from the passage of time. They seem to be going through the motions of life, but not experiencing it.  The two stories in between the first and the final show a progression of time. In the first story time is stuck in the present and is fixated in the past. In the second story, the narrator is fixated on the past, although events in the narrator’s life still seem to occur at a relatively normal pace, in the third story the train metaphor suggests that the narrator is passing life by, though the passage of time is still discernible, and finally the fourth story shows a very disjointed passage of time with a focus on the future. The philosophical result I garnered from this analysis and one that can be applied to literature, is that time doesn’t influence the perception of the course of events. Time stood still in the first story of “Juice”, yet there was not much progression in terms of plot advancement, and when time was speeding by in the last story it was going so fast that comprehension of the story’s plot was difficult, making it appear that no progress in the story was being made.