Summary: The Importance Of Memory

Memory is a close stranger. Being the faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events and impressions, memory plays a much significant role in our lives, because it allows us to remember. Imagine yourself walking on your way to work only to suddenly forget why you are in front of the subway entrance, and wondering why a big poster urges you to buy a brand new and discounted car before the arrival of 2015 July even though you know very well we are at the verge of greeting 1992. Wouldn’t it be inconvenient? Yet we tend to turn a blind eye to its great relevance, we see the ability to remember as a given thing.

It is only at the first signs of memory fading away when we start to really notice its undeniable importance in our everyday lives. In

It is not a container of thoughts, nor a big vault of replicas, it does not work like that. Once an image, a feeling or an event enters in our memory, chances are high it may be modified, distorted without us not noticing. What our eyes see, everything we hear and all the odours we smell are interpreted by our brains in the light of our past experiences and our cognitive processes. Then, like the pieces of a puzzle, they are fragmented and stored, but nothing guarantees you there will not be fragments missing when your mind tries to complete de jigsaw. A lot of the missing parts will be remade but you brain, and what you remember will not be exactly what really happened.

Salman Rushdie explains in his Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism –from which the original quote of this III question comes- what soon becomes obvious when reading Midnight Children: Saleem is an unreliable narrator and we should not interpret what he narrates as what exactly happened, but as his particular and changed version of it.

In Saleem’s own

We are told some of the things he sees, hears and lives, but often we do not know if what he tells comes from a piece of the stored puzzle or from its absence and consequent invention. There is a fair share of fantastical elements which are -on the least- partially shaped by Saleem’s memory holes and the creative and self-centred reconstruction his mind executes. It is natural, so, to sense in the pages of Midnight Children the aroma of magic realism, and it seems reasonable to attribute this quality to the central, crucial role memory has in the work. There is no doubt that Rushdie uses Saleem’s memory particularities as a powerful narrative tool, in addition to it being relevant in the story itself.