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Memory Keepers Daughter Literary Analysis Essay

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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. Edwards uses plot to set up a sort of life schedule. It goes in order …show more content…

But David, you missed a lot of joy". In the theme that life is beyond our control the author Kim Edwards has the book move through the years rapidly and at a fast pace in order to demonstrate how life flys by. Throughout the book Edwards uses photography as a metaphor showing the character David's growing obsession with taking photographs as a desperate attempt to make time stand still: "Photo after photo, as if he could stop time or make an image powerful enough to obscure the moment when he turned and handed his daughter to Caroline Gill". Life may also feel as it is out of their control with there being a constant aura of uncertainty or “what if” quality. That being said, the characters in the end will always wonder what life would have been like if David had never given his daughter away, but find it exhausting to wonder once they are brought together in the end after the death of David. As Paul reflects at the end of the novel: "His mother was right; he could never know what might have happened. All he had were the facts". Life was also seeming to be out of anyone's control with the struggle of the melancholy tone through the novel with Norah becoming more and more depressed becoming that of a drinker in Paul's young life and then being so unhappy with her marriage with David for him being so distant that she has an affair with a man while she is on a trip to Aruba with her job. Even with the tone the author seems to have it progress in a

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