Disappearance And Duration—Exploration Of Narrative Time In Mahabharata

Time is an unavoidable and important proposition in both humanistic philosophy and natural science.In the Mahabharata,time is not only the narrative content and narrative form,but also the manifestation of the thinking pattern of the ancient Indian primitive people.The language of this post-Vedic epic is plain and the style is simple,but the time consciousness presented in it shows an orderliness that is ahead of its time.The story time and narrative time of the Mahabharata are in a dynamic balance of opposites: story time is deliberately weakened and "disappears" from the narrative,becoming a pale narrative footnote;narrative time,on the other hand,overrides the narrative structure and controls the progress of the text with a continuous posture.In this paper,we explore the disappearance of story time,the extension of narrative time,and the hidden meaning of time behind the narrative time in the epic poem.In addition,from the perspective of narrative time,we will analyze the way of constructing time and its artistic value,and find the "big time" charm expressed in its narrative time.In addition,the study of the Mahabharata from the perspective of narrative time explores how time overrides and hides behind the narrative in the epic,and then explores the characteristics and connotations of narrative time in the Mahabharata,which is a new way of thinking that differs from traditional critical paradigms such as political and cultural criticism and enables us to touch the spiritual land of the primitive people at a deeper level.Influenced by the epic era’s view of time,time in the Mahabharata is endowed with divine power and creativity,capable of involving all things in reincarnation,and the text is full of depictions of the power of time.Story time in the Mahabharata is detached from narrative time and disappears into the narrative: the epic dissolves story time with dialogues,flashback structures,interjections and destinies,and the storyline can jump out of time and space and travel through dozens of generations.The Mahabharata uses the inversion of narrative chronology to prolong finite life,and the recurrence of various narrative threads in a large number of interpolated narratives,where narrative time becomes even more confusingly inverted.The tension between the finite life of man and the eternal extension of time is bridged in the narrative time.Time not only binds all things with desire and fate,but also gives mankind a path of righteousness,a path of cultivation without the existence of physical time,but only the supreme time of continuous flow.This actually represents the ancient Indian people’s respect and reverence for time,which can be freely expanded and retracted,and only through practice can people escape the finite and reach eternity.