The Power of Perspective and Forgiveness in Accepting Time

  

 

Throughout Chiang’s “Exhalation”, each individual tale serves to reinforce the theme that the past and future are fixed and unmalleable.  Despite this seemingly sad reality, the narrator feels uplifted when he learns that, “even though the past is unchangeable, one may encounter the unexpected when visiting it” (41).  This message seems to resonate strongly with Fuwaad, given his strong desires to visit the past and uncover any sort of knowledge or information about his wife, who died tragically and without being able to say goodbye to Fuwaad.  As the story progresses, Fuwaad evolves to truly understand the healing that comes from more fully understanding and making coming to terms with the past.

 

Fuwaad’s understanding of time and relationship undoubtedly changes throughout the short story.  At first, he is visibly disheartened by the realization that time is fixed.  However, as he listens more closely to the story of Raniya, he begins to understand that although we cannot change time, “we can know both [the past and the future] more fully” (41).  Before Fuwaad travelled to the past, he had very little understanding of it.  He recalls his attempts to reconcile his past, saying, “I spoke to a mullah about what I had done, and it was he who told me that repentance and atonement erase the past.  I repented and atoned as best I knew how … yet I was still haunted by guilt” (47).  Rather than attempting to more fully understand the past, Fuwaad was stuck in a self-loathing place, characterized by penance and remorse.  His actions were also carried out in an unhealthy, and impossible desire to erase his past, rather than understand it.

 

During Fuwaad’s journey to his past life, he confronts the past that he spent so much of his life trying to both atone for and expunge.  As he stands before his old house, the physician’s assistant who worked at the hospital his wife was treated at confronts Fuwaad and tells him, “She [Nayja] wished me to tell you that while her life was short, it was made happy by the time she spent with you” (55).  In this poignant moment, Fuwaad feels am overwhelming sense of peace and healing wash over him.  He recognizes that his journey to the past did not change his wife’s death, but says, “what I had learned had changed everything” (56).  It is clear that Fuwaad’s character has evolved from understanding the past as something that one must atone for and hide from, to something that one must live through and learn from. 

 

As the story ends, Fuwaad shares his newly acquired understanding of time and life with the King.  He says, “Nothing erases the past.  There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness.  That is all, but that is enough” (57).  His statement has been revised since the middle of the story, when he worked to erase the past.  Fuwaad now recognizes that we must confront our pasts, and seek out not only repentance and atonement, but forgiveness as well.  In viewing moments in our lives more fully and from a wider vantage point, we are able to learn much more about ourselves and the moments we live.

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