Questions About The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

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I found the way the author casually inserted fast-forward-in-time vignettes to be curious. This gives the tale a rather surreal quality and makes it seem rather ahead of its time. At what point did jarring breaks with temporal linearity become a tabu? (Later, of course, temporal gliches become "avant-garde".) Any thoughts?

Andrew Noselli Changes in time-sequences as a form of narration reached its apex with the delayed decoding parallel feature in the novels and stories of Joseph Conra…moreChanges in time-sequences as a form of narration reached its apex with the delayed decoding parallel feature in the novels and stories of Joseph Conrad but became taboo for novels after the apolitical movement of Dadaists and painters after World War I. In some ways, this type of false patterning of narration through changes in positions of chronology extends back to Henry James who introduced unreliable narrators into his tales, and was used most outrageously in the cut-ups and literary 'flotsam and jetsam' of 1960s writers like William S. Burroughs. From then on, it was taboo and not be used in literature, but only in terms of 'recurring memory' episodes on television and in the movies.(less)

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