Impossible Knife Of Memory

Some families have a few skeletons in their closets, but Aiden Lockwood's family really takes this to another level. The book starts out with 17-year-old Aiden who is going through life in a bit of a haze. His childhood memories, in particular, are hard to recall until the return of a friend that he hadn't seen in many years. With his friend's help, Aiden starts to piece together memories from his past. Memories that lead to strange dreams and a mysterious voice that calls to him.

Henry being so consciously aware of the reoccurring violence and deaths of many soldiers causes him to constantly reminisce about the war in Vietnam and its horrific events. “PTSD” however, is very common amongst veterans. My father who had fought in the Vietnam War had “PTSD.” And even after many years of prior to the war, his past always seemed to have consumed his reality. The violent images and emotional feelings about the war in Vietnam have caused him to visualize the war in a form of a nightmare whenever he sleeps. This can explain his frequent sleep talks at night about the Vietnam War as he screams “giết tất cả” which translates to kill them all. Of course he had it coming that the cause of his children to become distant towards him was because of his unexplained actions. But nonetheless, it is the result of many pasts that is the responsibility of shaping ones fear and sensation towards life.

The psychological effects, the mentality of fighting and killing another human, and the sheer decimation of human values is what makes war atrocious. War is not only fought on the battlefield though. This book also describes the feelings of a soldier fighting his own demons that war has brought on. The battle that the soldier has with himself, is almost if not more damaging than the physical battle of war. He will never forget his experience with battle, no matter how hard he tries the memories of artillery, blood, and death cannot be erased. “I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.” (Sledge). This struggle still happens to soldiers today. Sledge’s words of the struggles still captures the effects of warfare that lingers today. The other effects that war has on the men is the instability that surrounds them at every hour of the day. They are either engaged in battle having bullets and artillery fired at them, or waiting for battle just so they can be deposited back in the pressure cooker of survival. “Lying in a foxhole sweating out an enemy artillery or mortar barrage or waiting to dash across open ground under machine-gun or artillery fire defied any concept of time.”

In the book Soldier’s Heart by Gary Paulsen, Charley Goddard says, “I have got to become a man sometime.” Charley, a boy about 15 years old, lives on a farm with his ma, and his little brother Oran. His dad will not come around anymore because he gets kicked to death by a horse that goes mad.The horse goes mad because a bee lands on it. Charley wants to me a man and grow up, so he continues to ask his ma if he can join the army. His ma lets him join the army because she thinks the war will quickly come to an end, but little does she know it will not. Charley joins the war, and comes out with a soldier’s heart. A soldier’s heart represents the soldiers that come home looking different or acting different from when they first left. Also known as PTSD, which goes by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Charley develops from a boy looking for adventure into a young man with a “soldier’s heart” because he

In the book The Things They Carried, Tim said that it had been over two decades and every time O’Brien remembers it, makes it as if it was currently happening. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien claims, “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred a lifetime ago, and yet remembering makes it now.” (36) Everything Tim experienced when he was at war, still haunts him. The memories are basically nightmares which transport him back to being in the war. In a different article, Vietnam Veterans Still Have PTSD 40 Years After War, it states, “ "They started to come back one by one," says Evans, 69, of the nightmares started 13 years after she returned home from her one-year deployment in Vietnam from 1968-1969." I would see the fire, and then I would wake up in a cold sweat." ” (Traci Badalucco 1) Every time she would go to sleep, these memories - in the forms of nightmares - would come back. Everything experienced haunted her sleep making her unable to sleep. Psychological effects can affect everyday life, some people don’t even know the effects of war but yet they are still against

These flashbacks remind him he is still a child, just caught in an impossible situation. Beah described “Things changed rapidly in a matter of seconds and no one had any control over anything. We had yet to learn these things and implement survival tactics, which was what it came down to” (35). He was eventually taken away from the war environment and escorted out of the village he was stationed at to the Benin home. This home was meant to brain washed child soldiers get the education nack that they missed out on and give them the right nourishment needed. For English they read passages from books, learned to spell words, and sometimes wrote stories in their notebooks. The teachers said it was just a way of refreshing their memories. Upon arrival, he and his friends are already craving the drugs their lieutenant had constantly filled them up with. It had been more than a month and most of the children had completely gotten past the withdrawal stage. Although some kids still had instances of vomiting and randomly collapsing, they were finally able to feel better. This is when their memories of war begins to soak in. From the withdrawal of these drugs, he begins to have reoccurring phantasmic nightmares and stressful visuals being followed by serious migraines. He would busy himself with work all day going back and forth to the nearby river and continuously washing dishes. It was the only way he could distract himself from the thoughts that would give him severe headaches. He tells a example of a visual dream as “In my mind’s eye I would see sparks of flame, flashes of scenes I had witnessed, and the agonizing voices of children and woman would come alive in my head”(103). Often times his nightmares would act as a barrier to remembrances of his family. It took him several months before he began to relearn how to sleep without the aid of medication. Sometimes

In Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway, Harold Krebs has witnessed/experienced some of the bloodiest battles which can be traumatic and plays a factor which affects his parents and himself. Harold Krebs returns home from World War 1 while dealing with problems that he faced such as transition and obstacles as he works himself back to a normal life. People around Harold Krebs expects him to be the same men that he was and to act like nothing had happened as he came back from war. As Harold Krebs returns home, he finds himself having a hard time talking about his experience at war. Due to the traumatic experience Harold Krebs faced, it eventually alienated and lost focus of all the important stuff such as family has gone from his mind.

The Impossible Knife of Memory, by Laurie Halse Anderson is about a father-daughter duo who were trying to live a normal life so Hayley Kincain, the daughter, could finish her last year of highschool. Hayley’s father, Andy Kincain, was a veteran soldier who suffers PTSD from his active-duty days, and now currently is an alcoholic who has difficulty holding onto a steady job. Hayley constantly worries about her dad, as she inspects his truck’s mileage daily to see if he has gone to work, and skipping school to check up on him when she heard that Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Trish, has been contacting the school. Somehow, past all the panic and worry, Hayley manages to develop a close and stable friendship with her neighbor, Gracie Rappaport, who

I felt The Impossible Knife of Memory was to pedestrian for a college-level course. In my belief, the author should have focused more on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and how it affects families and friends.

I read the book Flares of Memory, put together by Sheila Chamovitz and edited by Anita Brostoff, written in 2001. This book is a compiled list of stories of children who experienced the Holocaust and survived. The line “I never saw any of my family again” (Brostoff, xxxiii) or similar variations of this line were stated multiple times throughout the book, mostly at the end of the children’s accounts of the events they endured. Just the thought of having to go through what these children went through makes me appreciate what I have in life much more. The thought of losing my family, although they annoy me sometimes, brought tears to my eyes. It made me think about the things that many take for granted. In reading this book, I found that

This article explains the importance of getting the perfect amount of sleep at night. The idea that sleeping for less than five hours or more than nine hours proves to have a negative effect on the human body. Sleep deprivation has a closely related link to memory retention and can cause a person to have trouble with daily task. The author continues to explain that not only is the brain effected by too little or too much sleep, but the rest of the body is also effected. Conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and even depression have links to not getting the perfect amount of sleep. The article concludes with listing tips to get the ideal amount of sleep at night, such as, going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day and limiting the amount of caffeine that is consumed throughout the day.

Within Ridley Scott’s 1982 ‘Blade Runner’ memories serve as the “cushion” (‘Blade Runner’ 1982) for replicant emotion; subsequently making them easier to control. By this, memory lays a foundation, with past experiences creating a bridge to feel and identify as more human. Through past and present circumstances, mood, and relationships, memory serves as a lever to react with a “readiness to respond” (HM Works) within both the present and the future. Scott explores the function of memory in order to illustrate the human psychology in a complex light, using scientific references as to highlight key debates in what makes humans more empathetic and how they use memory in order to be a more emotive species; thus, evaluating the superiority of mankind. Memory in ‘Blade Runner’ is used in order to create a platform to mould replicants into society as more functioning humans as to be a more exact replica, rather than to serve as the initial function of a “slave” (‘Blade Runner’ 1982).

Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory is a hallmark of the surrealist movement. Dali famously described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs” and The Persistence of Memory is a prime example of that description. The Persistence of Memory depicts striking and confusing images of melting pocket watches and a mysterious fetus-like structure all sprawled over the dreamscape representation of Dali’s home of Port Lligat, Spain. Dali uses strange images, color, and shadows in The Persistence of Memory to convey an abstract view on dreams, time, and reality.

The memory is an antimuseum, an invisible art that transforms each individual. It is ever developing, much related to spaces, in fact, memory is strictly related to spaces. They are formed in context of space and time, as I will later develop. Ever since the notion of memory came to be it was closely related and developed and explained using places, spaces, buildings. The perfect metaphor for memories is the city. The memory starts from something simple and by cumulating information it develops and grows. This metaphor connects the idea of memory and Architecture on a different, deeper level that normal. There are moments in history that are better recollected form the ruins of sculptures or of buildings than from the written stories.

Nothing ever impressed my dad something Amir from The Kite Runner and I have in common. I could never get my father’s attention. That’s when the bad behavior started. The only way I could get his attention was when I did badly in school. I started getting in fights, and flunking my tests, and then just then he gave me a glimpse of attention. He would ground me and then wouldn’t talk to me for weeks. All I wanted my dad to be was proud of his son. I figured being bad wasn’t working so I decided to start a sport.