Memory Keeper's Daughter Conflicts

The memories also play a dual role as they make the man hopeful yet they also scare him because he is afraid that through remembering things again and again he might taint his memories of the good times forever. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.” (McCarthy 51). The boy although carries on hoping even though all he has are memories of the polluted grey ashes that have always been falling from the sky, the ashes that he was born into. The child has no memories of a past world that held beauty and color and so he relies on his father’s accounts and stories of the past to imagine a world that was anything but the bleakness that he is so accustomed to. But the father, although mostly indulges to the child’s wishes, sometimes cannot bring himself to tell him made up stories of the past because as much as he wants to he cannot remember a lot of it and when he does remember it, it reminds of a world that is no more and that he does not know will ever come back into existence or not. “What would you like? But he stopped making things up because those things were not true either and the telling made him feel bad.” (McCarthy 22). Where at first the child believes the father’s accounts of heroes and stories of courage

David, the youngest was given away at the age of two. When his new family, the McDaniels took a look at him for the first time, he had a series amount of bed bug bites all over his body. Although he was raised in a very religious enviroment he still would visit his siblings ruth and milton and untie them from the barn everytime he would go back to his home. At the age of sixteen he ran away from his home and joined the military where he was able to move away from transforming into a rebellious teen. Many years after the return of David, he finally had the chance to reunite with his biological mother where he stated that when his mother saw him for a second time she did not show any sign of pitty nor regret she simply just stated “ you look just like your father.”

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.

On the other hand, it could be articulated that the female characters in both the novels have proved their mental instabilities, individualisms and rebelliousness have disturbed the lives of others. Moreover, it could be analyzed in the novels that both the author in their social context has explained the dark secrets of the life of individuals.

David Pelzer was finally freed from his abusive home after years of neglect from his family, doctors and educators. Through his book, A Child Called “it,” he recounts the different types of abuse he faced and the effects the abuse had on his ability to communicate with others and in his overall life. Throughout David’s abuse, his mother took the primary role of abuser by developing different reward and punishment techniques to discipline her child. As it is mentioned, her first disciplinary techniques and forms of abuse where to dehumanize and humiliate David by asking for others to ignore him, require the family to treat him as if he was not a member of the family, and wear the same clothes to school for months. David’s mother would also mentally mistreat him by using the “corner treatment” and then the “mirror treatment,” both techniques meant to make David believe that he was a “Bad Boy” that deserved to be punished. As well, his mother’s abuse often employed physical punishments such as beatings consisting of punches, kicking, and slapping. David was also stabbed once in the stomach and made to drink ammonia, Clorox and liquid soap. All of the abuse David suffered, resulted from years of child abuse neglect and sexism.

In the book “The Memory Keeper's Daughter” by Kim Edwards a doctor and his wife have twins and the first child is a healthy boy but then the second child that comes out is a little girl with the signs of down syndrome and he asks his Nurse to take the baby away to an institution while he tells his wife the baby girl died. Through out the entire book it is a struggle for Dr. Henry's wife Norah to have closure with the fact that her baby girl is said to be dead and she never saw her, held her, or cared for her. Kim Edwards shows through the whole book that we are only human, the themes that life is beyond our control and through the connection between suffering and joy.

Small illustrates David as a baby and stating “Getting sick, that was my language ” (19). As the story progresses, the panels portray David’s father, the radiologist as prescribing him a thick, gloppy syrup, his mother holding him down so his father could give him shots with a fearful look on the young child’s face. Then David is on the bathroom floor, a liquid surrounding his tiny body, his eyes widened and full of tears as his father proceeds to stick an enema in his rectum (20). Small utilizes dark shading and “juxtaposed sequential static images” to emphasize the brutal and unnecessary medical treatments his father constantly performed on him to ‘make him better’ which in actuality dismantled his physical and mental stability (Mccloud 8). Continuing, his father is later depicted using motion lines to show the cracking of David’s neck, then Small utilizes subject-to-subject to depict the x-ray machine (Mccloud 71). David’s innocent eyes and small body compared to the large, ominous machine, which foreshadows detrimental events that unfold later in the story (Small

David's mother got worse and she began to think of new ways to torture David. David was one of a few brothers, but only he was targeted. The other brothers pretended he wasn't even there. There was only one person in the family that still loved David was his father. David’s father would fight for David and would protect him from the mother. But, he would always lose. Whenever David's father went to work, David would get beat. Dave became the scapegoat for his mother's mistakes. David became a slave of the house and did all the chores. If he did not finish his chores with an unreasonable time, he did not receive dinner. David was starved for three days at a time. Once, David got stabbed by his mother for not completing her dishes. Whenever David came back from school his mother forced him to throw up to see if he got any food at school. This happened every

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

his father and dead mother. David's father has an idealized vision of his son as

For this essay I aim to show the importance of memory and of remembering the past in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale is a ‘speculative fiction’ first published in 1985 but set in the early 2000s. The novel was in response to changes in US politics with the emergence of Christian fundamentalism, the New Right. Atwood believed that society was going wrong and wrote this savage satire, similar to Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, depicting a dystopia which she uses as a mirror to hold up to society. I will be focusing on the main character and narrator, Offred, “a handmaid who mingles memories of her life before the revolution with her rebellious activities under the new regime” (book group corner), as she

The novel starts out in a perception of a twelve year old boy named Jonas who lives in a community that thrives in “sameness”. “Sameness” is described as a 2-D dimensional life, meaning there is no war, fear, hunger, sadness, or any experience a normal 21st century individual might have. It gives a black and white filter of life, which means perfect to the leaders of the community know as the “The Elders”. When Jonas was chosen as “The Receiver of Memory” he finds out what magnificent things the elders have taken away from society and discovers the nature of color, sadness, hunger,war, happiness and love.

Proving the importance of memories, Teo’s essay observes that Kathy uses memory as a way of expressing her identity. The memories allow the audience to see what she has been through and what she did during those times, therefore showing them who she is. While there are moments when Kathy will interrupt the narrative with her current self’s

At the age of 5 years old, not only did he began to take showers with his father, but when they went to the beach club, his mother bathed him in the shower in the presence of other naked women. By the age of 6 years old, David noticed the power men had over women, “when a male entered the women’s side of the bathhouse, all the women shrieked”. (Gale Biography). At the age of 7 and 8 years old, he experienced a series of head accidents. First, he was hit by a car and suffered head injuries. A few months later he ran into a wall and again suffered head injuries. Then he was hit in the head with a pipe and received a four inch gash in the forehead. Believing his natural mother died while giving birth to him was the source of intense guilt, and anger inside David. His size and appearance did not help matters. He was larger than most kids his age and not particularly attractive, which he was teased by his classmates. His parents were not social people, and David followed in that path, developing a reputation for being a loner. At the age of 14 years old David became very depressed after his adoptive mother Pearl, died from breast cancer. He viewed his mother’s death as a monster plot designed to destroy him. (Gale Biography). He began to fail in school and began an infatuation with petty larceny and pyromania. He sets fires,

Memories are precious. They are stored and accessible for the decisions that people make on a daily basis. However, some people do not have this luxury. Clive Wearing is a man who lacks the ability to store memory. Without this ability, Clive has been forced to live a very different life.