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Analysis Of Memory And Personal Identity In The Film Memento

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Memory and Personal Identity in Film The film Memento lasts for nearly one hour and fifty minutes, during which the main character Leonard Shelby suffering short-term memory loss manages to discover the man killing his wife. Since he can not memorize things for more than 10 minutes, all he can do is record everything happening the last minute by tattoos on his body or snapshots. It turns out his search for the attackers does not go on well, for he met with a suspicious guy called Teddy, a cop, who claims to be Shelby’s old friend. Teddy promises to assist Shelby on searching the attacker while actually he just wants to use Shelby to kill the drug dealers. Gradually Shelby discloses Teddy’s attempts and is going to kill him. As a matter of fact, Shelby has already killed the attacker at the beginning but fails to remember that, resulting in his unrelenting efforts on searching that guy and sufferings from the misery of losing his wife again and again. To make sense of the story and appreciate the artistic wisdom of the film, we have to analyze the main actor’s problem of memory and his personal identity. Furthermore, we can mirror ourselves through analysis of personal identity of the main character in the film. First of all, we should figure out in the case of Shelby whether he still has personal identity. To begin with, it is necessary to clarify the definition of personal identity. Literally, personal identity entails what differentiate one person from another as well as

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