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"Telling Time in Puritan Conversion Narratives"
Meredith Neuman, Postdoctoral Fellow, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
April 21, 2005

Puritan conversion narratives often frustrate modern readers not only because they lack a familiar sense of interiority but, at a more basic level, because the "plots" fail to conclude in a satisfying manner.  The most compelling glimpses of personality and familiar modes of storytelling usual occur in the preconversion period, while ambivalence, detachment, uncertainty and incompleteness seem to characterize the narrator's expression of postconversion life.  This pattern is best understood not as a failure of narrative technique but as a strategy for marking the radical shift in self-perception which accompanies Puritan
spiritual transformation.  Irregularities of time are common in these narratives, and dramatic ruptures in narrative chronology commence with the onset of spiritual revelation.  Conversion caused Puritans to conceive of their own experiences as unfolding simultaneously within phenomenal and divine timeframes.  The highly unconventional ruptures in narrative technique are in fact experimental strategies for representing the intersection of the worldly self and the eternal soul.