time

Time lapses in discourse are often meant to hurry along the reader's experience of the story, to edit out the boring, unecessary information. Time lapses in life are exactly the opposite--they tend to condense the events we most enjoy.

Today, for example, I led a trip to Cedar Key to go kayaking. We paddled, explored a graveyard, paddled, and ate lunch on the beach before paddling back to mainland. All this took four full hours--and yet it seemed like only one. We then spent an hour meandering the tiny town--yet it seemed like only 15 minutes. We were with friends and had found huge "small" ice creams for $1.34 (including topping), the weather was beautiful, and no one was contemplating homework yet.

In recounting today's events to my friends, I'll surely go into detail about the fun times we had--attempting to draw out those gone-all-too-quickly experiences into a longer memory. Of course, I'll skip over the driving time and bathroom time--that's what discourse time lapses are for, after all.

Viewing the final page of Krazy Kat on page one hundred and twenty five gives an understanding of the causality of time in relation to the story and discourse of a comic. The lines of the panels, or lack there of, are laid out to accent and draw the reader’s attention to the final comic frame located in the bottom right corner. In the last panel, a dramatized version of the entire story, still visual to the viewer of the panels, is being told in the past tense but could be visually taking place in the present moment. As explicated by the discourse, the entire story is told in the last panel, but takes all of the panels on the page to present the stories actual time relative to the events of the narrative that were supposed to have taken place.