Persistence and Memory Summary and Analysis

"As we have seen, the memoir is a kind of fiction, differing from the 'first novel' (conventionally an account of crucial youthful experience told in the first person) only by continuous implicit attestations of veracity or appeals to documented historical fact" (Chap. 9, p. 310). When personal writing moves from the strict daily diary, they begin to approach the figurative and the fictional. Sometimes the diaries do not capture the event in the way the writer had hoped.

Fiction is dependent on the hero's power of action. This is part of Frye's Theory of Modes. He talks about there being five modes that go around in a circle. The characters go from being free in the pre-war days to being prisoners of wartime bondage and absurdity, and life in Britain seems to commemorate the war. This is in terms...