As the reader progresses through Amis’s pages, it becomes apparent that the narrator retains his memory only from the novel’s commencement, identified in reality as Odilo’s death, yet he is unable to recall anything that happened prior to this event, forcing him to relive his life in order to understand it. This crucial point is Amis’s remark on the selectivity of memory, specifically the selectivity of those events which force us to question our humanity or in reference to an important event. On this point, Alistair Brown observes that Amis’s work “suggests that a memory receives additional importance (though not necessarily moral value) when it recalls an individual as having influenced, or shared with others in this unifying way, a global event” (Brown, 2002). Kakutani builds on this, writing “The emotional effect of the story is thus subverted: instead of seeing how youthful expectations were betrayed, we simply see how one man 's sin were whitewashed and concealed” (Kakutani, 1991). Odilo’s or his soul’s inability to recall past events and simply live life as if nothing has happened is a testament, not only to the subjective discrimination of memory on the individual level, but the aggregate collective and their critical discernment of history’s events.
Despite all of Amis’s methodologies and accompanying literary critiques, the novel’s most direct and perceived purpose is its singular retelling of the Holocaust and the events that took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The