French philosopher Henri Bergson introduced the concept of time as intersecting planes
of consciousness and being that form an organic whole. From Bergson’s extreme reworking of
the idea of time where chronological order is de-stabilized and “states of consciousness, even
when successive, permeate one another” (TFW 98), the ideas of memory and experience were
liberated from the constraints of linear separation. Writers reacted to these novel ideas, and Paul
Douglass writes that many of the American modernists are heavily indebted to Bergson’s theory
of time, including Fitzgerald, Eliot, Frost, Cather, Stein, Henry Miller, and Faulkner (2). From
Bergson’s theories, many American modernist writers responded in radical ways through their
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texts. Katie Moss writes, “They [modernists] had to change the structure in order to capture their
fragmented personal reactions. They were seeking a resolution to their internal conflicts. They
wanted realism, but realism that could somehow define the internal struggle to find one’s self”
(4). Through the rise of technologies and different ways of life, the spread of war and new
perspectives on a global scale, and Bergson’s radical notion of time, the modernist writers gained
the ability to form new ways of expressing being, memory, and experience.