Memory

Throughout the novel, the author explores the ways in which memory, remembering and forgetting, might affect the individual's understanding of themselves and the world around them. Six months after Sem’s heart attack, he tells his doctor he wants to go off the medication he has "been taking for nearly five years" (37). One of the medicine's main side effects is memory loss, which his doctor insists "doesn't kill you" (37). However, for Sem, forgetting his past feels like a form of death. "If I forget everything, my whole life, if I can't recognize my child's face, if I forget my own name, isn't that the same as dying?" he asks his doctor (37). Disinterested in the doctor's response, Sem becomes obsessed with discovering what he might already have forgotten. At the start of the novel's second section, "Red Bandana," he explains these dynamics in the form of a...