Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

THE NOTION OF TIME 
NATURAL CONCEPTUAL 
(clock-time) (mind-time) 
FICTIONAL
(story-time) Figure 3. The Notion of Time.
As can be seen in Figure 3 above, natural time is public time, it is the time indicated by clocks. 
By comparison, it could be added that conceptual, psychological time, or phenomenological time, is 
private time. It is perhaps best understood as awareness of physical time. Psychological time passes 
relatively quickly for people while they are enjoying an activity, but it slows dramatically if they are 
waiting for some unpleasant event to occur or to be completed. This totally different speed of 
passing time can be explained by that fact that the clock is measuring physical time and is not 
affected by anybody’s awareness. Conceptual time, as Genienė explains (ibid.), is rather abstract 
and related to mental human abilities. In addition, psychological time is completely transcended in 
the mental state of happiness and enlightenment, that is often called nirvana, and we might interpret 
this as implying that psychological time stops completely. Conceptual time shows temporal reality 
in the way human beings perceive it in their mind, whereas natural time simply indicates neutral 

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parts of the time as a whole that is divided into longer or shorter periods, namely: minutes, hours, 
days, months, seasons, etc. However, Onega and Landa (1996: 112) argue that physical time is 
more fundamental even though psychological time is discovered first by each of us as we grow out 
of our childhood, and even though psychological time was discovered first as we human beings 
evolved from our ancestors.
By comparison to the two aforementioned kinds of time, fictional time is a device created to 
attain certain psychological effects. Onega and Landa (1996: 110) assume that this is imaginary 
time describing the life of the characters in a particular piece of fiction. Indeed, in literature, the past 
can be subsequent to the present, it can merely be a remote past that never actually dissolves into 
the recent past, the point from which the narrator is narrating, as in most classical traditionally 
arranged novels. In addition, in Genienė’s opinion (2007:24), literary works usually include an 
eternal present without either past or future, or a certain labyrinth in which past, present and future 
coexist, at the same time complementing and annihilating each other. Typically, novels have a 
beginning and an end and, and in the fictional world life has a perceptible meaning, as the reader 
can see the narrated events from a perspective never provided by the real life. Without doubt, as 
Stevenson says (1998:19), this way of presenting events sometimes “limitates the capacity to grasp 
what is happening” and thus, it becomes more complicated for the reader to understand the essence 
of the literary work. Indeed, it is possible to agree with Stevenson’s idea that sometimes modernist 
fiction simply betrays life, portraying everything from the subjective, interpretive, and unreliable 
perspective . Thus, as Genienė concludes (2007), the reader is given a number of different occasions 
to guess, interpret, or to doubt if his or her understanding is correct, which is both good for 
imaginative readers willing to draw their conclusions and bad for those who prefer exact neutral 
descriptions. 
As can be seen from the evidence above, the notion of time is rather complicated and can be 
divided on the basis of different criteria. As Eman Chowdhary and Kirti Kaul say (2006:6), even 
today, man knows a little about how the origin and nature of this notion. However, both scientists 
express hope that with the help of science, much has been written about space and time explorations 
and thus, these notes are a significant means help for every person interested in the studies of these 
two concepts. In general, time is an abstract notion, which is impossible to measure, control, or to 
stop. On the other hand, people have invented a number of ways of dividing and naming 
theoretically measurable and practically experienced parts of the temporal whole that surrounds all 
the living creatures. Time can be universal and private, neutral and subjective, real and fictional. 
Overall, adhering to the aforementioned explanations by Stevenson, Onega and Landa, and 

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Genienė, I would suggest depicting the relationships between these kinds of time in the following 
figure: 
Figure 4. The Dynamics of Relationship between Different Time Systems 
E 
X 
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