The argument about the relationship between time and narrative is now coming into focus. It begins in the Kantian notion that we have no access to things in themselves, but only, as phenomenology holds, to things as they are experienced, apprehended in consciousness, thought about, or understood. But the concept of consciousness cannot be taken for granted. Philosophy in general, both in the phenomenological and in the Anglo-American analytical traditions, has turned to language in order to investigate the realms of experience, perception, thought and understanding. If consciousness is fundamentally linguistic, it follows that we ought to be able to study what we think of as phenomena, or the only reality to which we have access, through linguistic forms. There are philosophers and linguists who have taken this approach to the relationship between linguistic forms and metaphysics: that some understanding of reality can be reached through the analysis of linguistic forms, and even that some understanding of what time is can be reached through an analysis of temporal reference in language, and particularly through the understanding of tense. What has not really been done is to apply this argument specifically to narrative, and therefore to move not only between linguistics and metaphysics, but to infer from the tense structure of narrative a metaphysics of time.