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The aim of the study is to compare Samuel Beckett's monodrama Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Wiesław Myśliwski's novel Ucho Igielne (2018) in the context of the construction of time, which, despite the genre and content differences between those literary works, is parallel. The characters are returning to the past by reconstructing the figure of their younger selves and entering into a specific dialogue with them. The relationship between the past and the present is interpreted in the context of Paul Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity. Each of the works is an unusual study of the old age and the structure of human memory.

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin's autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie "Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r." [At an exhibition "The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944"] and Wisława Szymborska's Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.