Memory And Imagination

We see the first instance of the power of memory as White, accompanied by his son, travels towards his beloved lake. “... I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot--the coves and streams...” Going off on a tangent, he starts to remember detail after detail of his summers like a chain reaction by telling us of the “...cool and

Memory is a powerful concept. Often when an individual undergoes a traumatic situation, the ramifications of these actions seep into an individualfs psyche unknowingly. In effect this passes through memory and becomes sub-consciously buried within a personfs behavioural patterns generally. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink explores the concept of a young mans subconscious desire for a woman whom he gcanft remember to forgeth (1Memento) as she is so deeply inlaid within his soul.

Everyday people rely on memory. Remembering to set your clock the night before, the routine you do every morning getting ready for the day, remembering what you must do for the day, and remembering something as simple as making a sandwich. None of this is possible without memory. Memory is the ability to be able to mentally remember and manipulate information. Memory can be affected by strong emotions, injuries and diseases. There are different types of memory; sensory, short-term, and long-term memory.

Memory is used as a powerful conduit into the past; childhood experiences held in the subconscious illuminate an adult’s perception. Harwood uses tense shifts throughout her poetry to emphasise and indicate the interweaving and connection the past and the present hold. By allowing this examination of the childhood memories, Harwood identifies that their significance is that of an everlasting memory that will dominate over time’s continuity and the inevitability of death.

In the book “The Assault,” by Harry Mulisch, the author demonstrates how the main character, Anton, becomes free of the influence of his memories by showing that Anton's approach to memory changes over the novel course of the novel – from protective denial to acknowledgment. However, what remains static is a constant self awareness that Anton shows in-regards to his attempts to repress these memories. During the beginning of the novel (post-tragedy) Anton is a shell of his memories of the night where is family was killed. This is shown through how many details of his character, from major life aspects such as his wife or his job, to insignificant things such as what sorts of media he likes, can all be traced back to his allegedly forgotten memories.  The

Lest we forget” Baker’s attitude leads his mother to question, “Does history remember more than memory?” Here, rhetorical questioning indicates the way in which private memories are often abandoned in favour of public representations of historical events. The public representation of the Indigenous history is the one written from the European perspective, whilst the private memories, from the Indigenous perspective, similarly to Genia’s, are often forgotten or not validated. However, Baker soon comes to realise that these memories of his mother are just as valuable, if not more, than those of his father. He acknowledges that; “Unlike my father, she could never show her children the scars on her arm; hers were invisible, numbered in the days and years of her stolen childhood”. Through metaphysical imagery, Baker, and ultimately the audience, recognise the eloquence and value of Genia’s memories in shaping a voice and persona that, although equally valid to those of other survivors, has not been publicly recognised.

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

Memory is a something that you remember from your past experiences so you can learn from them and adapt whatever you learn to control your life in which direction you want to be in, because our life without memory is empty .I read about “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Hope, Despair and Memory” , they think of memory something that you can't forget about it what happened to you in the past, because that's how they learn there life lessons, passage #1 used repetition and informal diction, passage #2 used repetition and painful diction.

Experience’s turn into memories and memories are exile by other means. That is stating that the genesis of memories are events that were attended by the individual and that the reminiscence of the past expels us from living in the present. There have been many instances in an individual’s life to support this; past failures, the death of a loved one or, the haunting of a heinous experience. In the fictional memoir Fugitive Pieces, Ann Michaels thematizes the importance of memories in presenting the positive and negative effects it has on one of the narrators Jakob Beer.

A certain image, scent or sound can bring back moments that may have been forgotten. The speaker is astonished by the dreams she has of her mother. Her mother died very ill, the person who she was when she died was merely a shell of who she truly was. She describes her as “so much better than I remembered.” (Monro, 151). At the end of her mother’s life she could not hear her voice. She remembers her “mother’s liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened [as] a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features.” (Monro, 151) In her dreams she was able to hear her mother’s voice again, opposed to the reality before her death. A mother’s voice is beautiful, and there is no other sound that compare to something as unique. Elliot writes “The unconscious sifts through memory, and then offers up details either strangely distorted or implausibly combined. As in art, as in story, dreams too, render experience metonymically.” (Elliot, 79). With time memories inevitably fade, but the dreams bring a sense of comfort and replenish the image of her mother. “How could I have forgotten this?” (Monro, 151). Heller writes that this scene “serves as a springboard from which the narrator launches into a story being told by her mother.” (Heller, 1). This scene leads us to the central conflict in the story of her mother’s life, and assists in understanding the conflict

  Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

Memory is a property of the human mind. It describes the ability to retain information. There are different types of classifications for memory based on duration, nature and retrieval of items.

Both Friel and Bryce portray that even through memories one cannot escape their reality and is still trapped in their existence as it is not as one wishes it was. ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ is a memory play therefore, it is appropriate that memory plays a key theme throughout. Although it does, Friel maintains it as an underlying theme, which is only spoken about at the end of the play. He speaks of memory often through Michaels monologues as he states, ‘What fascinates [him] about that memory is that it owes nothing to fact. In that memory atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory’ he often recognizes that memories simply offer a chance at recollection and that perhaps memories are not all in all

Before considering whether or not memories affect our reality, it may be useful to offer a definition of the term ‘reality’. If we are to