The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August presents memory as the fundamental component of personal identity. The novel contrasts characters who remember everything with those who forget, suggesting that without a continuous recollection of one’s past, the self is effectively erased. At the same time, the novel highlights the burden of memory, which holds the accumulated weight of one’s traumas and transgressions, suggesting that there is value in forgetting.

This definition of identity is central to the novel’s premise, as it is what distinguishes kalachakra from “linear” humans. The same figures recur in every life Harry leads, but unlike Harry, most have no memory of other lives; their unique identity effectively ends with their physical death. The concept of the “Forgetting” further solidifies the link between memory and existence. The Forgetting is a process, either chemical or surgical, that wipes a kalachakra’s mind completely, and it is considered a “true death” (108). This act, used as a punishment by the Cronus Club, underscores the novel’s thesis that the mind and its memories constitute the self. The physical body may be reborn, but without its memories, the individual is gone. This idea is complicated by characters like