Memory Wall

“Alma would have preferred amnesia: a quicker, less cruel erasure. This was a corrosion, a slow leak. Seven decades of stories, five decades of marriage, four decades of working for Porter Properties, too many houses and buyers and sellers to count—spatulas and salad forks, novels and recipes, nightmares and daydreams, hellos and goodbyes. Could it all really be wiped away?”

This list of the things that define Alma’s life, summarized so briefly, creates an ironic contrast. It highlights the vast difference between how significant her life is to her and how insignificant it can seem on a larger time scale in which nothing lasts. The cruelty of dementia lies in the fact that this loss of memory and identity occurs before death, so Alma must be a witness to her own erasure.

“‘It tends to unravel very quickly, without these treatments,’ he said. ‘Every day it will become harder for you to be in the world.’”

The story’s main conflict pits the individual against time and the inevitability of death. In this quote, Dr. Amnesty establishes the stakes of this conflict for Alma. His succinct description of what she will experience has an understated quality but still manages to evoke solemnity and convey the gravity of what it means to lose one’s memories.

“‘Science,’ Chefe had said, ‘is always concerned with context. But what about beauty? What about love? What about feeling a deep humility at our place in time? Where’s the room for that?’”

This quote is, in part, about transcending what is momentary—i.e., “context”—with what is universal and timeless. The gorgon fossil is monetarily valuable because it’s both rare and trendy. This assessment of value influences what is deemed worthy of scientific study. Here, Chefe argues that the fossil should be valued for more meaningful reasons that broaden its context, like its ability to evoke a sense of wonder and perspective regarding humanity’s place in history.

“‘There were times when I was happy and times when I was not,’ continues Alma. ‘Like anyone. To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.’”

Alma’s rare moments of greater lucidity contrast, ironically, with her usual characterization. She’s typically portrayed with emphasis on her racism and classist entitlement, qualities that demonstrate ignorance. Her level of insight in this quote, by contrast, shows how impermanent personality can be. More importantly, her comment about happiness prompts the question of what defines a person and their identity. The narrative suggests that one’s life is defined by the combination of countless moments, or in other words, by one’s memories.

“‘What’s the one permanent thing in the world?’ he’s saying now. ‘Change! Incessant and relentless change. All these slopes, all this scree—see that huge slide there?—they’re all records of calamities. Our lives are like a fingersnap in all this.’”

Harold’s fascination with fossil hunting and his observation in this quote develop the symbolism of fossils within the story. Fossil hunting is an attempt to defy the sense of erasure that comes with the inevitability of death. The fact that something remains long after a creature’s death, in the form of a fossil, brings comfort by suggesting that death doesn’t mean total erasure. He balances this self-interested wish for permanence through his humble recognition of how insignificant one life is—a finger snap—when compared to geologic time scales.

“Dusk in the Karoo becomes dawn in Cape Town. What happened four years ago is relived twenty minutes ago. An old woman’s life becomes a young man’s. Memory-watcher meets memory-keeper.”

The unique relationship between Luvo and Alma demonstrates the role memory plays in human connection and in creating collective consciousness, developing the theme of the intersection of personal and collective history. Their story depicts the intersection of personal and collective history on a very small time scale, while the relationship between humans and fossils in the story represents a much larger time scale. Luvo’s character helps bridge the gap by hunting fossils and living in Alma’s memories.

“It’s the rarest thing, Luvo thinks, that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.”

Luvo experiences Alma’s memories and so takes on parts of her identity, but through those memories, he’s also greatly influenced by Harold. On the surface level, Luvo’s observation here reiterates the story’s thematic ideas about Memory’s Role in Identity, Loss, and Preservation. However, the fact that he’s echoing Harold’s views adds new significance. The inevitability of death feels, to many, like permanent loss and erasure. However, Harold’s words and ideas have influenced and been passed down to Luvo, so a part of Harold remains and is never truly lost.

“This is not real suffering, she tells herself. This is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary. That in every genealogy someone will always be last: last leaf on the family tree, last stone in the family plot.”

Infertility takes a large emotional toll on Imogene. As depicted in this quote, coping with infertility pushes her to contemplate the relationships between biological and evolutionary instincts to reproduce, social and personal attitudes surrounding procreation and parenthood, and her own experience of loss with her parents’ death. Thinking about having children in the context of genealogy and descendancy develops the thematic look at the intersections of personal and collective history. The imagery she uses—the last leaf, the last gravestone—emphasizes her sense of life’s fragility.

“It should be straightforward, she thinks. Either I can have babies or I can’t have babies. And then I move on. But nothing is straightforward.”

The central conflict in “Procreate, Generate” revolves around Imogene and Herb’s struggle to get pregnant, pitting them against human biology and the forces of nature. This also puts them in conflict, indirectly, with the feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy that stem from their infertility. Imogene’s belief that it should be straightforward exemplifies the kind of socially reinforced attitude that leaves her unprepared for the emotional toll of infertility.

“The body has one obligation, he thinks: procreate. How many male Homo sapiens are right now climbing atop their brides and groaning beneath the weight of the species?”

Herb’s thought, in this moment, that the body has only one obligation shines a light on the roles human perception and emotion play in procreation. The inability to produce offspring feels so shameful and defeating to him that he begins to see reproducing as the main, or perhaps even the only, source of his worth. The metaphoric “weight of the species” is an enormous burden for an individual. A sense of the collective unconscious, felt throughout the story collection, is echoed in Herb’s sense of connection and generative responsibility to the human species.

“Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them?”

Memories can serve as bridges that connect generations. Davis’s son shares the experience of fighting in Korea with his grandfather, but Grandpop’s Alzheimer’s disease creates a rift in that connection. The inability to summon memories is a form of powerlessness that echoes Davis’s sense of powerlessness over the dissolution of his marriage and the safety of his son in combat. Doerr’s stories often explore how humans cope with powerlessness and loss. Davis clings to memories and holiday traditions, but he knows his father doesn’t have this option. Ultimately, the question asked in this quote isn’t meant to be answered but to prompt contemplation of memory’s role in identity, loss, and preservation.

“Maybe, she thinks, I’ve got this all wrong. Maybe at some point a person should stop accumulating judgments and start letting them go.”

Many stories in this collection explore the idea that the passage of time is inextricably linked to loss and that most things eventually erode or decay. Doerr’s tales depict various human efforts to defy this, such as accumulation, and in “Village 113,” this accumulation manifests through the objects people take with them when they move. The seed keeper, on the other hand, has accumulated judgments about her son, the city, and the government that prevent her from accepting the situation and moving on. Her realization in this quote prompts contemplation about what people will choose to preserve.

“What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”

This quote further develops the story’s symbolic connection between seeds and memory. Through its biological role in reproduction, a seed represents intergenerational ties. Memories of Li Qing as a child, interactions with him as a man, and observations of Jie as a child reflect these ties on a small scale. On a larger scale, seeds symbolically connect the seed keeper to the collective unconscious of the human species, demonstrating the intersections of personal and collective history. This informs her sense of duty to preserve the village’s history and memories and her choice to save herself and her seeds from the flooding.

“Our side, their side. But perhaps, she thinks, there is no good and bad to it at all. Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.”

The seed keeper has developed an us-versus-them mentality toward the government and the dam project. This reflects broader tensions between nature and human intervention, symbolized in the story by the seed keeper’s views about village life versus city life. After resisting the inevitable loss of her village for so long, her epiphany in this quote demonstrates that she’s finally achieved acceptance. She realizes that The Balance Between Loss and Renewal is part of nature, and loss and destruction exist alongside rebirth and creation.

“He says his dad used to take Mom sturgeon fishing every Sunday for years and Mrs. Sabo probably caught a few in the old days but then there was overfishing and pesticides and the Kaunas dam and black-market caviar and his dad died and the last sturgeon died and the Soviet Union broke up and Mom grew up and went to university in the United States and married a creationist and no one has caught a sturgeon in the River Nemunas for twenty-five years.”

Doerr’s style of dialogue in “The River Nemunas” sets it apart from the collection’s other stories: He omits dialogue tags and communicates characters’ speech in a stylized manner that implies complex emotions and relationships in few words. This technique, called polysyndeton, allows Doerr to explore a variety of complex, interconnected ideas through its breathless summary of the major events of Grandpa Z’s life. The specific factors Grandpa Z provides here for the lack of sturgeon in the river characterize him as observant, pragmatic, and inextricably tied to the history of Lithuania.

“We see things. Sometimes they there. Sometimes they not there. We see them the same either way. You understand?”

Though Grandpa Z doesn’t yet believe Allison about seeing the sturgeon, his comment here develops the story’s message about belief and faith. It also demonstrates his understanding of Allison’s grief and the ways grief can influence perception. Symbolically, the sturgeon represents both a belief in things unseen and a way for Allison to connect with her mother’s memory and past. In this context, Grandpa Z’s comment suggests Allison can choose to preserve even the things that are inevitably lost to time.

“The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know. What was Mrs. Sabo’s life like? What was my mother’s? We peer at the past through murky water; all we can see are shapes and figures. How much is real? And how much is merely threads and tombstones?”

“The River Nemunas,” like every story in the collection, depicts pairs of abstract, opposing forces. These dichotomies always demonstrate a sort of balance, usually one outside human control and potentially beyond human perception, but balanced, nevertheless. For Allison, her desire to know more about her mother’s past and culture is opposed by several obstacles to finding answers: her parents’ death, Mrs. Sabo’s dementia, and language barriers. Doerr uses metaphors of tombstones and threads to represent death and the sometimes-tenuous connections at the intersections of personal and collective history.

“‘First we die,’ the woman says. ‘Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths. […] Then,’ continues the woman, ‘in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And when the last one of them dies, we finally die our third death. […] That’s when we’re released to the next world.’”

The description of the three deaths in Esther’s first vision establishes the context of the story’s titular afterworld. It echoes a philosophical idea about death that appears in various religious and cultural traditions. The three deaths reinforce the idea that death is not a permanent and total loss, and that identity and legacy can persist beyond a person’s physical death through memories. The tall house in the yard of thistles, which Esther sees in her present-day visions, represents the world “folded inside the living world” mentioned in this quote. Near her death, Esther swings between this world and the living world, demonstrating the confluence of past and present, of this world and the next.

“One month, it seems, no one in Hamburg is wearing armbands and the next month practically everyone is. Photos in Reich newspapers show soldiers on parade, tanks draped in roses, plantations of flags. In one picture six German fighter-bombers fly in formation, wingtip to wingtip, suspended above a mountain range of clouds.”

Doerr was inspired to write “Afterworld,” in part, by a deportation manifest he came across while researching another novel. It listed 13 girls between the ages of 5 and 15, all of whom were sent to Auschwitz. The historical context of the story’s setting—Germany during WWII—evokes horror and prompts complicated questions about how past experiences, especially traumatic ones, shape identity. Esther’s memories of the war and the events leading up to it, described in this quote, belie the sense Robert gets in school that the war is ancient history.

“Each girl becomes a carrier of her own individual measure of hope, fear, and superstition.”

Doerr writes about a significant and pivotal historic event—the Holocaust—yet he approaches it with a focus on the experiences of individuals. Rather than a distanced, detached view of the horrors of World War II, Doerr presents an intimate portrayal of the war viewed from within one city, one building, and one mind. Through Esther, he illustrates individual reactions that demonstrate the various ways people cope with fear, as well as the larger resonances these seemingly small reactions have.

“Maybe, she tells Robert, during her clearest moments, a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what’s happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration. Maybe that’s what Dr. Rosenbaum saw in her; maybe that’s what he was thinking as he stared into the white wardrobe that afternoon up in the attic of Number 30 Papendam: that there was something in her worth saving.”

Esther’s epileptic episodes come with both positive and negative effects. Doctors see them solely from a clinical perspective, in terms of their negative symptoms like convulsions and unstable moods. They diagnose them as seizures, a label that reduces them to a disease that they feel obligated to eradicate. However, the positive effects—Esther’s connection to other times and other worlds—reinforce the collection’s thematic idea about balance and renewal. Esther is willing to accept the physical hardships of seizures to experience the metaphysical gift of these connections to the past and future, which can be seen as a window to the intersections of personal and collective history.

“Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.”

“Afterworld” and other stories in the collection feature recurring depictions of spirals, like in the fossils and the organization of Alma’s wall in “Memory Wall.” In this story, spirals appear in crow migrations and bicycle chain guards. These spirals symbolize evolution, both of the human species and of an individual’s arc through life and toward death. Esther’s unique vision allows her to see the inward direction of this arc, which suggests that the afterlife is not an external dimension but something essential within. The afterworld, then, can be viewed as the part of the self formed from memories, thought of as identity or soul; the part of a person that remains beyond death.

“Within the wet enclosure of a single mind a person can fly from one decade to the next, one country to another, past to present, memory to imagination.”

Many stories in Memory Wall are characterized by a unique temporal structure. Along with motifs emphasizing the inevitable passage of time, these structural choices highlight the central role of time as a concept in the collection. Perception and memory can distort time, but they can also allow humans the freedom to shape their world and their reality. For Esther, memories of the war and the other girls in the orphanage are important aspects of her identity. They’re also a way to honor and preserve those girls’ lives after their tragic deaths. This quote exemplifies Memory Wall’s messages about the role of memory in creating meaning and identity and connecting individuals to the collective history of the human species.