Memory and History

Throughout Northern Lights, O’Brien toys with familiar conceptions of linearity in order to expose the ways in which the past continually erupts into the present. From the novel’s first scene, O’Brien entwines Perry’s present self with his memories of home, place, and family. Perry continually muses, “It was hard to tell where it started,” and later proposes, “It may have started or it may not have started. It was partly the town. Partly the place. Partly the forest and the old man’s Finnish religion, partly being a preacher’s kid, partly the old man’s northern obsessions, partly a combination of human beings and events, partly a genetic fix, an alchemy of circumstance” (8-9). Here, the past and the present intermingle in a cloud of “place[s],” “obsessions,” “human beings and events.” Perry is unable to separate cause from...