Past

Throughout the novel, G.G.’s and Gaustine’s ongoing clinic project acts as a narrative gateway into the author’s explorations concerning the safety and the dangers of retreating to the past. At the novel’s start, when G.G. describes his relationship with Gaustine, he underscores the fact that “We shared a common obsession with the past” (18). Therefore, although the clinic of the past is initially meant to provide therapy to Alzheimer’s patients, neither G.G. or Gaustine are able to control its impact on the population and their ongoing hopes of expanding the project. Their obsessive relationship with the past, therefore, precludes their ability to command authority over their imaginative creation. “The past,” G.G. asserts in Part I, Chapter 12, is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you imagined” (47). Indeed, over the course of the chapters...