“One could step across light-years, unaged; so it was possible to outrace light and time. Did one not want to die, bound to a single lifespan? Go forward. See the future. Visit the world/worlds to come. But never go back. Never alter the past.”

I chose this quote because I think that what this quote says is the most important thing in this story. It could be used as a really short summary: the main idea in this text is that people can build their future but not change their past. It also is the main idea of my analysis of the text, which is basically that people can prepare for their future, get educated and work hard to have a good future but the errors people make are not erasable.

Figurative language:

Allusion: Mythological: traveling in time, going to the future or the past has always been a myth that civilizations wanted to accomplish

Simile: decade of 5040’s compared to kaleidoscope

Metaphor: “Master Key” - shortcut

Symbols: “Gates” - door to a new World

                “Sun” - source of life, warmth

                “End of Time” - destruction

                “Trees” – Nature, growth

Plot elements: -Exposition: the narrator explains how the notion of time works in his

                         World and how people travel in time

                        -Rising Action: Harrh knows what the future is but wants to enjoy the

                          Present time

                        -Climax: Alhir talks to him about a “potsherd”

                        -Falling Action: Harrh’s memory fades

                        -Resolution: Harrh has more than one body and one name

                        -Conflict: the hero can't live a normal life because he knows what will happen next. He has

                         many lives

Tone: sincere, melancholic, poetic, unsure

http://www.campusaccess.com/images/education.jpg

The reason why I chose this picture is because I think the theme is about making good choices in life and thus having good education to get a good future.

The psychoanalytic criticism is best here because there is a hidden message beyond the text. A psychoanalytic critic would say that this story represents choices we make. When analyzing the quote I wrote above, he would say that, in our life, we can program our future but we can’t go back in time and change the mistakes we made. But if we get too deep into programming our future and try to organize all of the details, we will eventually get bored and hope will be lost, “It was the place where hope ended”. He would also say that some people are given opportunities to plan their future faster (“Master Key”) and that others are given the opportunity to go back in time like time-menders to change the mistakes they made. Finally, a Psychoanalytic critic would suggest that people shouldn’t know exactly how their future will be because their future might not be as nice as they want it to be and they might have hard times enjoying the present time if they know their future is going to be bad, just like Harrh discovers the future of his world and lives in sadness in the present time because he knows that his world’s future is not good.