“I Forgot”

One of the things I connected ot this book between the themes of the class and what we’ve previously read is the power of selective memory. In Alias Grace, we see that Grace doesn’t remember the day of the killings yet it was obviously one of the most important moments in her life that’s had a huge effect on her and the direction of her life. This gets to me because like Saleem in Midnight’s Children, it raises the question of memorizing important things and  the memory of important things. I feel like that’s not only an important trait of good novels, but also just an important trait to highlight in humans in general. Think about this, the doctor needs to get an accurate story from Grace, who’s already given him two or three accounts of what happened, all of them differing substantially. This reminds me of almost any important story in the history of human kind where there are different interpretations where there absolutely shouldn’t be any. The religious myths, and even a story of a child is subject to shifting memory, whether malicious with intent or not, the fact that we base our reality on something that shifts like quicksand is remarkable, especially when it has something to do with our emotions and how we feel. 

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