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“If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy" (44). Thus runs one of the early musings of Jack Burden, the protagonist of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Throughout the story, however, as Jack gradually opens his eyes to the realities of his own nature and his world, he realizes that the human race cannot forget the past and survive. Man must not only remember, but also embrace the past, because it teaches him the truth about himself and enables him to face the future.

The first passage reveals the parallel suffering occurring in the lives of different members of the family, which emphasizes the echoes between the sufferings of the father and the narrator. The narrator’s father’s despair over having watched

“Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”, focuses on the relationship between the protagonist, who is referred to as ‘Child’, and his father, referred to as ‘Ba’. The opening story follows the protagonist as he is struggling to overcome writers block, whilst dealing with his estranged Vietnamese father who is visiting. A number of flashbacks are used as a literary device to divulge into the protagonists past with his father as well as the fathers past. This reveals, not only an abusive past with his father, but also his father’s memories of the Vietnam war. It becomes clear that the son makes excuses for his father, with his girlfriend Linda also noting this, “I think you’re making excuses for him…You’re romanticising his past to make sense of the things you said he did to you” (pp.20). The protagonist reflects this himself, making the excuse that “he was a soldier” (pp.13), and that is why his father treated him as he did. The protagonist, despite once being able to admit to Linda that his father abused him, can no longer admit this, as his relationship with his father grows, and it can be argued that he is willing to overlook his past in an attempt to reconcile with his father. “It was too much these words, and what connected to them” (pp.13).

The author’s melancholic, yet, optimistic tone arouses mix feelings from his readers. Bragg clouts his readers’ perception of his father with harrowing, however, coveted recollections of the past. In the author’s comparative recount of the Father’s demeanor, he paints an unsettling, yet a hopeful life of his father:

Mitchell's regret stems from his inaction, the notion that he knows he could have done more. Gradually, the guilt grows within

In “The Time of Our Lives,” the first chapter in Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir, Birkerts’s describes that as he aged “there came a point in [his] life when memories and feelings started coming in loud and clear.” He explains that over the span of many years, the emergence of discontinuous memories began to tell a story and before he knew it “a memoir had announced itself.” According to Birkerts, an essential characteristic of memoir is discovering and utilizing involuntary memory to restore forgotten experiences and form logical connections between them. In order to understand involuntary memory, one must first understand voluntary memory.

Past memories in a person’s life can be positive or negative. Regardless of what type of memory it might be, it could influence one’s life. In the poem, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe and in the story “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen the main characters dealt with something that changed their lives. The mother in “I Stand Here Ironing” made past mistakes which lead to a poor relationship with her daughter Emily. The narrator in The Raven was so lost in the past memories of his loved one Lenore that he started to hallucinate things that weren’t really there.

The author’s purpose was arguing that people’s memories could explain the facts in their life. McGlone wanted to let reader knew that memories was a key to solve some mysterious things. In this essay, he argued that recent advances in cognitive psychology have cracked open a code book that historians can use, even on memories two hundred years old.

This book is a memory story: a man in his sixties looks back on his boyhood of the middle class boy recalling the events that took place on a summer visit to an aristocratic family in Norfolk in the 1900’s. The author uses double narrative, the young Leo's actions told by the older Leo, and it shows us how it has affected his life

Sudden events such as a loved one passing away can shatter someone’s sense of order; it can push towards nostalgia and further alienate from everything. When getting lost in these memories, we visualize the actions that we could have done and the actions that could have been avoided in order to bring more happiness to the lost loved one. Nevertheless, a sudden loss also has the power to free us after all the meditation. It might help us appreciate again the world, help us grow and become receptive again. Soderbergh’s non-linear story “The Limey” shows precisely this through the exploration of the main character’s stream of consciousness and his complex notion of moral character.

A 22 year-old man looks through his old VHS camcorder and sees himself as a child. While he reminisces the old days, nostalgia creeps in and starts to work its magic. As featured in Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The past exists only in our memories…the present is our only reality” (Pirsig 222). The man is taken aback by how easy it was to be a child in his time period, and starts to dread and wish that things at the present could be simpler like the past. Nostalgia has performed a trance on the man. By remembering the past, it affected his current mood and thoughts. All from only

The tone of this story is one of fear, regret, and guilt. The story first leaves the reader with impression that it may be a recount of the life of a daughter who was lost due to neglect. Soon it is evident

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.

One of the main concerns of contemporary philosophy has been the role of the memory in the life of the individual and the group, or more precisely - the lack and excess of memory. Memory is something very unreliable, because it causes the same kind of decay that invades our physical bodies, undermining the identity of every individual and every society. Even though human identity is based on historical memory, neither individuals, nor societies should be limited in categorical way by it and the importance of forgetting should not be diminished. In consideration of memory, psychoanalysis and history as disciplines may be merged to provide one with a more expansive view of this phenomenon, without reducing one to the other. Reading

Responsibility is an important quality that mature people possess. People make mistakes, but the maturity level of a person is determined by whether or not the person takes responsibility for their errors. The short story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” by Richard Wright and the lyric poem “Forgive My Guilt” by Robert Coffin both fixate on young boys who wrongly take the lives of creatures with a weapon. The short story and the lyric poem share a common theme regarding the significance of early life experiences to the maturation process as seen in the way the main characters react to their mistakes. Dave in “The Man Who was Almost a Man” runs away from his problems while the narrator in “Forgive My Guilt” holds himself accountable for his action and feels guilty.