The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Time Quotes

According to the narrator, Notre-Dame is in a constant state of flux. And he's not just talking about statues crumbling or wood rotting, either; he's talking about it changing, not deteriorating. As he says a little later, "Time is the architect, the people are the mason" (III.I.21). In other words, time manifests itself through Notre-Dame's weird, mixed-up architecture. So does this mean that the cathedral is a permanent structure or an impermanent one?

Time isn't necessarily something that goes around changing things on its own. It's actually people throughout time doing the changing. In fact, the narrator seems to be preparing the ground for an idea of time as something synonymous with human-wrought change. While he might see gaudy renovations as a generally bad thing, he also seems pretty keen on the idea of a building being a collective accumulation of peoples' histories. Get this: we can use this idea as a metaphor for the novel, too, because each character deposits a bit of his or her history to create one grand story. Mind = blown.

We're going to call all of Book V.II a conceit, which basically means that we're supposed to take a statement like this with a grain of salt. Okay, so the narrator does not literally mean that the printing press means the death of all architecture. Instead, he's using this statement to make a point about the shift in attitudes toward art—and to implicitly suggest that the novel is the new cathedral (hint hint).