A Tale for the Time Being Through the Lens of Schrodinger's Cat

 Katie Roessel

EN 487 21st Century Literature & Time

9/19/22

A Tale for the Time Being: Through the Lens of Schrodinger's Cat

    "A Tale for the Time Being" is a novel that is, in all senses of the word, incredibly meta. The story itself has so many layers and different perspectives that eventually become entangled, despite being a decade and thousands of miles apart. We read Nao's diary from the perspective of Ruth, seeing her thoughts and analyses in the margins as footnotes, and then we read Ruth's third-person narrative about her perspective on Nao's diary and Ruth's own personal struggles, which she reflects upon based off what she reads in Nao's diary.

    Throughout the novel, one of Ruth's biggest mysteries while uncovering the secrets within the lunchbox and the diary was Nao herself: did she really exist? Or was her diary a fabrication of someone's cruel imagination? This mystery grew even deeper when Ruth could not find a single trace of Nao on the internet, including the viral video of her that Nao directly mentioned by name. This is later explained away by Haruki's "spider" which wiped out all mentions of Nao on the internet. However, there is still some sense of uncertainty from Ruth.

    Appendix E discusses the thought experiment of Schrodinger's Cat. There is a 50% chance that, when the box is opened, the cat inside the box is alive, and a 50% chance that the cat is dead inside the box. As stated in the appendix, "Due to the quantum principles of entanglement and superposition, until you observe it, the cat must be both dead and alive, at the same time" (Ozeki, 414). In the context of the novel, Nao is Schrodinger's Cat. Ruth is unable to observe Nao, and she often ponders whether she actually exists. Nao is encapsulated in the diary amongst her words, and as Ruth reads about her experiences, Nao is in the constant flux of existing and not existing, at least from the perspective of Ruth, her reader. On the other hand, Nao is writing to an omniscient reader, one that she cannot observe. From the perspective of Nao, Ruth as the reader both exists and doesn't exist.

    Both Nao and Ruth, two quantum-entangled individuals, have a Schrodinger's Cat-esque and symbiotic relationship to one another in the roles as reader and writer; one cannot exist without the other. "A Tale for the Time Being" creates a narration that relies on the connection the reader and the writer have from the story that they share, and comments on the idea that their existence is constantly in flux and relies on the other.






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