The individual's position within society is an important aspect of Alfred Bester's works of the early Cold War era. Mainly focusing on one's sense of self and the destructive influence of aspects of Cold War culture, his texts are often concerned with the impact that sociological issues such as conformity or consumerism can have on personal identity. In various short stories between the 1940s and the 1960s especially, Bester explores these contemporary concerns via the individual's place in time. These stories demonstrate Bester's examination of time as a social force and the similarities between time and society as concepts within which the individual exists but to which they remain subservient. With the 1950s being a key period in American history regarding the impact of conformity on the individual, Bester's works concerning time within this period aim to reflect the relationship between social conformity and temporal conformity.

This focus on time meant Bester wrote a number of works utilizing time travel as a means of exploring how time affects the individual, but he also examined time by writing the occasional alternate history narrative. By using alternate history rather than just time travel as a vehicle to examine the self in time, Bester was better able to examine just how much agency the individual has over time. Most depictions of alternate history require input, whether intentional or not, from an individual, whereas time travel not resulting in an alternate history requires a passive individual who observes rather than acts. However, Bester presents individuals unable to purposefully alter history regardless of their input, causing them to be passive via external forces rather than through their own actions. Even when their input does affect the course of history, it is depicted as predestined rather than a true alteration. As such, alternate history becomes the key means, especially for Bester, in which to explore how, and whether, an individual has the (in)ability to affect time and society.

Bester's approach to time within his works is frequently through the lens of satire and his alternate history stories often rely on subverting social understandings of how history works. As such, his narratives that employ time travel or alternate history rarely do so as a means of creating or determining history but rather present them as aspects which merely exist within a predetermined construction of time and history.