Beethoven's Third Symphony, also known as Eroica, represents a profound departure from the composer's earlier classical style. It introduces experimental and dramatic forms of expression that lay the groundwork for the emergence of Romanticism in music. Two 20th-century authors, British writer Anthony Burgess and Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, each wrote a novel inspired by the structure and musical elements, such as polyphony, variations, and counterpoint, prevalent in Beethoven's symphony. The intimate relationship between music and literature has been explored and categorized by such scholars as Wolf (1999), Rajewski (2005), and Petermann (2018), who have contributed greatly to the understanding and development of the "musical novel." These works use specific literary techniques to imitate the musical medium, including methods associated with stream-of-consciousness, which focus on revealing the inner workings of consciousness, often to uncover the psychological depth of characters (Humphrey, 1954). In these novels, the manipulation of musical tempo and narrative time converge, creating a unique interplay between music and narrative. Carpentier's El acoso and Burgess' Napoleon Symphony each adapt the structure of Beethoven's symphony to their respective settings: Napoleon's France and Batista's Cuba, mirroring the symphony's roughly 45-minute duration. This paper explores how both authors employ stream-of-consciousness techniques to manipulate narrative time and explore the ways in which these techniques interact with recurring themes, motifs, and, in a Bakhtinian sense, the contradictory and dialogical ideologies present in their works.

A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit is an important modernist novel by Chinese writer Lin Huiyin. In the tension between realist content and modernist form, it shows all walks of life through the juxtaposition of spatial narrative in 1930s’ Beijing, while the description of the public modern medical and newspaper movie spaces reflects the penetration of Western conceptual thought. However, in the early 20th century, influenced by Western colonialism, Chinese society continued to undergo profound modern transformation, and the change in time perception was one of the important manifestations. From the traditional circulation theory to the linear progress theory, the change of Chinese people's view of time reflects their acceptance of a modern ideological device.Although modern novels are still a linear arrangement of words in time, and the reading experience of readers is the same, some modern writers such as Lin Huiyin attempt to create a maximum synchronic narrative effect, and her A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit is an important case.

A person's perception of time and space is always limited, however, literature can provide a panoramic perspective that transcends the boundaries of self perception of others. A Day at Ninety-Nine Degree Fahrenheit spatializes time and unfolds the external activities and inner situations of characters from various social classes in Beijing on a limited day. Interestingly, this narrative style echoes the montage technique in modern films. Although watching movies also requires following the temporal rules frame by frame, the use of montage techniques may provide viewers with a more intuitive and synchronic cognitive perspective. In fact, during the enthusiasm of translating and studying Soviet film montage theory in the 1930s, the novel is very likely to mixe montage with scattered perspective from traditional Chinese painting, creating a realistic three-dimensional sense of space and time on the paper, mapping the fluidity of transformative Beijing's old and new, the foreign and the vernacular, and constructing a spatial and temporal model that can be described as subtle, dynamic, and visualized. This not only reflects Lin Huiyin's unique literary construction as an architect, but also probes the relationship between literature and space-time, and the threshold that words can reach.