Memory Wall

Throughout Memory Wall, Anthony Doerr demonstrates a keen awareness of the influence that history has on the human experience. He presents time on minute and grand scales, juxtaposing the human lifespan against geological time scales to illuminate how perspective can change ideas about existence. His characters sometimes share this historical consciousness. At other times, they are mired in the here and now, unable to see how their conflicts can be resolved or how balance can be restored. They gain this awareness by recognizing how their lives intersect with the past and with the lives of others. The stories in this collection portray memories as a bridge: They connect one generation to another and individuals to the human species, forming a collective unconscious that helps people derive meaning from existence.

Two stories in particular, “Procreate, Generate” and “The River Nemunas,” explore intergenerational connections on the smallest interval, between parents and children. As Imogene waits to learn if she’s pregnant at the end of “Procreate, Generate,” she has a memory of her parents from her childhood. The memory itself is nothing pivotal, but its placement in the narrative highlights the symbolic link between memories and intergenerational connections. Like Imogene, Allison loses both parents at an early age in “The River Nemunas.” Unable to learn about her mother’s past directly from her mother, Allison must rely on other sources: Grandpa Z and Mrs. Sabo’s memories, photographs, and an intuitive, shared connection to the river and the land around it. Memories, then can become part of the fabric of the world. They become harder to interpret in this form, as Allison notes: “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” (183). Both characters demonstrate the challenges of making sense of the world without their parents, whose memories would guide their sense of belonging and identity.

In “Memory Wall,” Doerr approaches the topic from a longer perspective, as Alma tries to distill the meaning of her life amid memories of her husband attempting to understand humans’ place on a geological time scale. It is Harold, though, who gains new awareness by recognizing the intersections where individual existence meets human history. Looking at ancient fossils in his youth, he says, “We think we’re supposed to be here, […] but it’s all just dumb luck, isn’t it?” (9). In his sixties, after taking up fossil hunting, he says he’s “reclaiming something vital, finally trying to learn about the places he’d grown up, grappling with his own infinitesimal place in time. He was learning to see, he said, what once was: storms, monsters, fifty million years of Permian protomammals” (29). Harold now sees the connections between his life and all that occurred in the same place before him. He senses the ancient memories that have become part of the earth and stone and recognizes how they contribute to his identity and sense of self, placing himself in the context of a larger historical framework.

Many characters in these stories demonstrate something akin to the collective unconscious, a part of the unconscious mind theorized to be shared by all humans, containing a set of instincts, memories, and ideas that are not learned but rather inherited from an ancestral past. In “Village 113,” protests against the dam and encounters with scarcity mirror ancient, archetypal scenes: “Here, a thousand years ago, monks lashed themselves to boulders. Here a hunter stood motionless sixteen winters until his toes became roots and his fingers twigs” (127). The seed keeper is connected to these ancestors through this collective unconscious, as if their memories have been hibernating in the forests, cliffs, and caves around her. These intersections between individuals, generations, the species, and the past become meaningful because they reveal how small acts, preserved and shared through memories, can resonate through time and become part of a larger context.