Content Warning: This section references bullying, abuse, self-harm, and suicidal ideation.

Cat’s Eye explores nonlinear concepts of time and memory to challenge linear narratives. The novel’s structure alternates between Elaine’s present life and her childhood memories, interweaving past and present. This circular style of narrative values interconnectedness over separation. From the novel’s opening, Atwood envisions time spatially, not as a line “but a dimension, like the dimensions of space” that one can traverse (3). Elaine describes time as liquid transparencies layered upon each other, with the past unpredictably surfacing into the present. Returning to childhood locations in Toronto triggers Elaine’s recovery of buried memories. While linear time marches inevitably onward, memory’s subjective timescapes suspend Elaine outside of aging’s fixed trajectory. She inhabits both her child and adult selves, dramatizing time’s malleability.

Memory and the passage of time are linked to a number of physical objects and symbols within the novel. As Elaine sits in a church in Mexico in front of a statue of the Virgin of Lost Things, she identifies herself as a kind of lost thing, stuck between her childhood and adulthood. However, given Elaine’s identification with the Virgin Mary, she is also a kind of Virgin of Lost Things, gathering together old and forgotten objects that allow her to unlock the past.