By writing in each character's stream of consciousness and placing so much importance in each character's psyche, Faulkner places us directly in the middle of each character's brain, allowing us to pick them apart and see the world as they see it, experience the world as they experience it. While Woolf uses time as a canvas, mode of operation to unite the events of Orlando, Faulkner uses time as a thread to tie together the characters and their thoughts. As in Orlando, in order to fully absorb the events that were occurring, I had to throw away my conception of time. Both Woolf and Faulkner demote time from a position as the driving force to a plot to one of structure, making it the canvas on which philosophies and musings are expressed, or the thread that weaves in and out of a psychological portrait. Woolf narrates philosophically, and Faulkner narrates psychologically, but both take control of time and use it to tell their characters' stories the way they want to tell them.

After writers like Woolf and Faulkner turned the methods of narration and storytelling completely upside down, expanding the possibilities of a characters voice and point of view, modern-day authors have had to find new ways to present their stories in an interesting and compelling manner. In Dogeaters, Filipino-American author Jessica Hagedorn chooses to, for the most part, stick to the traditional model of storytelling, structuring the book in vignettes that diagrammed the character for me, reveal the character wholly, so that I didn't have to do any forensic guesswork in order to understand the chain of events, as in The Sound and the Fury. Unlike in Orlando, there is no magical realism involved. If anything, the book is overwhelmingly realistic, painting a picture of the Philippines in the 1960's, the epoch of the Marcos dictatorship, presented in the book as a nameless but recognizable "president." If Woolf gave me a portrait of a life in Orlando and Faulkner gave me a portrait of human psyche in The Sound and the Fury, Hagedorn gave me a portrait of a time, an era, a moment in Dogeaters. The book is a brilliant jewel that let me experience a instant in time from many facets, allowed me to absorb the fiery chain of events that ties each shining facet together.

Dogeaters is steeped in time as a medium, dripping in the faux decadence of a post-imperialist Philippines still immersed in American pop culture. It's a collection of vignettes starring characters who are all indirectly related to each other, a sort of Magnolia-esque tapestry of stories, an ensemble cast acting separately to tell their latently connected slices of the larger overall story that the author presents. While the connections are sometimes difficult to follow and it reads, at best, like a badly written telenovela (imported Mexican soap operas dubbed over in Tagalog), the many different points of view allow us to relive the corruption, pseudo-Americana, flamboyance, and tumult through the eyes of the rich, the poor, the revolutionary, the powerful, the struggling, the ambitious. We are given a sense of omniscience. We see this point in history through the eyes of the Philippines as a whole, and not just through the eyes of one of its people. Every character is affected by the political events occurring throughout the book, culminating in the assassination of an important congressman, Senator Domingo Avila, and what holds our attention is the different ways in which each character's life is changed.

The defining moment of Dogeaters is when two characters from opposite ends of the spectrum of wealth (money plays a prevalent role in the book) come together at the end of the book. She, Daisy Avila, is the daughter of the assassinated senator, a socialite beauty queen turned guerilla-in-hiding. He, Joey Sands, is the illegitimate son of an American solider and a Pilipina prostitute, a heroin junkie who spins at a famous gay club and rents his body out to rich foreign businessmen on vacation. After her father is assassinated, Daisy disappears from the public eye, relinquishing her title. Rumors fly that she's run off to the jungle with some guerilla fighter, but we don't find out for sure until Joey is forced to go into hiding because he witnessed the senator's assassination. An old friend puts him in contact with members of the underground resistance, led by the MIA Daisy Avila. Their union is symbolic of the unity that all Pilipinos would experience when the revolutionary movement became more widespread, a foreshadowing of the People Power movement that would take the nation by storm when the people decided to overthrow the Marcos regime.

Dogeaters is proof that modern-day authors can adhere to the conventions of English and still tell a story with innovation. Orlando and The Sound and the Fury raised the standard for storytelling, expanding the possibilities of what a novel could accomplish. Hagedorn turns over the accepted notions of what a story is and how to tell one. Instead of any one character, time is the protagonist, time is the hero. After all the characters die away, the era is what will live on, what people will remember. Previous authors have worked around the idea that time, like character and plot, is essential to the atmosphere of the novel, a necessary attribute of storytelling. What Hagedorn did was make time the essence of Dogeaters, placing it in the limelight and making it the star. She continues Woolf, Faulkner, and Cummings' tradition of paying no attention to the syntax of things, putting feeling first, before structure, logic, coherence, and possibility, forfeiting conventionalities for the sake of artistic expression.