A Christmas Memory

“A Christmas Memory” is narrated from a distinct point of view, the complexity of which is due partly to the narrator being simultaneously an adult and a child; though most of the plot is set in Buddy’s childhood, it is the adult Buddy who narrates these memories. The effect is dramatic: The narration renders the experience and viewpoint of a child, but it does so with an adult’s eloquence and wisdom, and the matured consciousness holds knowledge of “future” events, imbuing the narrative with irony, foreshadowing, and at times a sense of fatedness. Moreover, because the narrative is explicitly a collection of memories, it is theoretically a past-tense chronicle—yet grammatically, the narration wanders between disparate verb tenses, showing a flexibility and dynamism in the adult narrator’s process of reflection. The predominant verb tense is the present, suggesting that while the narrator recounts past events, he has such a powerful emotional connection to those memories that he feels transported by them. Likewise, the narrator is aware of the reader and wants them, too, to feel transported; the story opens with the imperative to “[i]magine a morning in late November” (3), and the