That Time - Common Threads

Common Threads

Each voice in That Time has a subject area independent of the others at first, but as the play progresses, connections are made through common images and recurring themes. C’s story takes place in winter (“always winter” (C1)); B’s events take place in summer so it is logical to assume that A’s tale happens in autumn (“grey day” (A1), “pale sun” (A8)). A sits on a stone step but remembers sitting on a stone in the folly, B sits on a stone by the wheat field and C on a marble slab in the portrait gallery linking the memories. The facts that the man's parents are both are dead and the green greatcoat (“the distinguishing outer garb of many of Beckett’s characters”) left for him by his father are mentioned in A12 and C2.

Each of the three scenes created by Voices A, B, and C lays claim to being a “turning-point,” “that time” marking the “never the same but the same” when a self might possibly be able to “say I to yourself” (all quotes, C5).

The voices are trying throughout the play to place all the events in the right time order and also remember when in particular certain events occurred: “Was that the time or was that another time” (C6). Vivian Mercier in Beckett/Beckett asks: “Are they memories or fictions…? Is all memory a fictional process…?” (p 236) In each voice, the idea that the person is inventing people or events is stated or suggested, as when voice B says, “just one of those things you kept making up to keep out the void” (B4). These voices from Listener’s past are not entities in their own right, they are how he now remembers/imagines the voices from that time. Listener is an omniscient narrator albeit a flawed one, which is why each of the voices has some insight into the others’ times and repeats phrases from at least one of the other time frames.