Time Past and Time Present

Since I have not done this yet, and it is long overdue, I figured I would give my two-cents on Arcadia since I have not yet said anything about it:

My comment has something to do with time.  We have already talked about the strangeness of the fact that past and 'present' are overlaid in the play, I wanted to talk a little more about the effects of that.  In a 'normal' story with a linear timeline, we watch events transpire in order and, in that case, we are able to hope for the characters.  We can see the bad coming and hope that something will change and that they will be alright in the end, but in this case, the characters in the past, namely Thomasina, are doomed, not by their time, but by the future.  In the case of Thomsina, we cannot hope for a reprieve from fate because, instead of being told of her fate in the present and, like Oedipus, suffering in real-time, the fate is given from the future.  In a literary sense, Thomasina is not doomed by her circumstances, or by the present, but is, instead, doomed by her future.  As soon as the people in the 1990s say that she dies that night, it is unavoidable.

This might seem like something insignificant, but in terms of literary devices, (in my knowledge) it is very rare.  It is not something that happens often, and the way that the story plays out both in its textual space and phenomenologically, unite to create an a-typical version of fate in literature.