Roy certainly portrays both kinds of temporal paradoxes in her novel, but in a way that suggests that temporal hybridity would be a more precise description than paradox, evoking as it does a more complicated blend. Roy implies in her novel that the temporal reality for victims of post-traumatic stress is more than a contradiction of two experiences—amnesia clashing with flashback, for example—as each side might already be hybrid: amnesia might hold a hidden set of memories, and flashback might still represent a selective forgetting. The concept of temporal hybridity, rather than temporal paradox, acknowledges the contradictions but also acknowledges that the combinations may be so intertwined that their separate parts are difficult to identify.
