A Brief History of Time Literary Elements

Science / Astronomy

Earth, and the Universe, there is no actual "setting" in terms of the narration.

Stephen Hawking is the Narrator. He tells the reader about the history of the study of the Universe from the point of view of a "lay person " rather than a scientist.

The tone is informative and friendly. The mood is optimistic.

There are no real protagonists and antagonists per se; in early Astronomy, Aristotle was the antagonist to the status quo scientific belief that the Earth was flat, because he believed it to be round.

There is not major conflict in the book, but there are many small conflicts between early astronomers and philosophers as to the basic tenets of astronomy. For example, there was conflict as to whether the Sun orbits the Earth, or the Earth orbits the Sun.

There is no real climax in the book. It reaches conclusions based on the period of astronomical study that the author has reached in each chapter.

Aristotle's study of astronomy and his conclusions based on his studies foreshadow the knowledge that we have today about the basics of Earth (it is round and not flat) and the Universe. It also foreshadows the work of Galileo and Copernicus.

Hawking states that humans are "barely more than monkeys" which most evolutionists would believe understates and over-simplifies the fundamental differences between species.

Hawking alludes to the work of many renowned philosophers and astronomers such as Aristotle and Copernicus.

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A theory can be "proven" in a sense a thousand times but it is still never truly proven because who is to say for certain that the next thousand times the same experiment is undertaken that a different result might be seen and the theory then disproved.

There is a parallel between the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo and the earlier work of Aristotle and philosophers of his time. Hawking also shows a broader parallel between the fields of astronomy and philosophy.

Hawking will often use the terms scientists, philosophers or astronomers to encompass a school of thought rather than using their individual names to identify them one by one.

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