Narrating Time Through the Body: A Corporeal-Semiotic Reading of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

This study analyzed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by integrating corporeal narratology with Greimas’s semiotic square, examining how temporality and identity are constructed and deconstructed through the body. Benjamin’s body serves as a semiotic field where oppositions like “youth/old age” and “life/death” are generated, clash, and collapse. The semiotic square revealed how these binary structures become unsustainable and the internal disintegration of the semiotic system, highlighting both the model's utility and limitations in complex corporeal narratives. Corporeal narratology emphasized the body's role as an active agent that embodies and enacts the collapse of meaning, contributing to the disintegration of narrative structure. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrated that body, time, and identity are core semiotic forces that uphold and undo narrative structures.