61 pages • 2 hours read
Memory Man
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Themes
The Curse of Total Recall
Decker’s exceptional ability also separates him from common human experience. He believes he has lost the ability to process certain emotions, like empathy or sympathy, and can’t relate to others in a normal way.
Decker only seems able to respond appropriately to two people—his wife and his daughter. This slim connection to humanity puts him at great risk: When his wife and daughter are murdered, Decker contemplates suicide because he has no one left to ground him.
Aside from the way in which his gift isolates him, its greatest downside is its inability to let him forget. The murder of his family is forever stored in his consciousness in specific detail. It can be recalled at will but can also intrude into his thoughts at any time. Decker views his perfect memory as far more of a curse than a blessing:
It was all still there, like a cinema screen on the inside of his eyeballs. It would always still be there. He often wanted to forget what he had just seen. But everything in his head was recorded in permanent marker. He either dialed it up when needed or it popped up of its own accord. The former was helpful, the latter infinitely frustrating (9).
Fluid Identities
Decker begins his career as a happy-go-lucky football player. A brain injury alters his mind and personality so radically that he can’t recognize himself. He often mentions that a stranger has taken over his life: “For twenty-two years of his life he had been one sort of person. He had been ill-prepared in the span of a few minutes to involuntarily become someone else entirely” (147).
The perception of Leopold’s identity changes over the course of the novel as well. He is initially seen as a drug addict, then a murderer’s accomplice, then a victim of domestic crime, and finally a sociopathic con man.
Decker calls Leopold “inexplicable” because Leopold’s identity is so hard to pin down: “‘And we don’t know what Leopold is yet, except strange and a hell of an actor. He plays a clueless idiot better than anyone I’ve ever seen” (350).
Wyatt represents the greatest identity shift. She’s born with an intersex gender identity before receiving a brain injury that turns her into a manufactured savant. She then undergoes a sex change operation. Under Leopold’s influence, Wyatt changes from a crime victim into a victimizer.
The fluid nature of identity is the reason that Decker has such a hard time tracking down the killers, as his perceptions of them are continually transforming.
Facts in Context
Others prize Decker’s brain because of his perfect memory. Though we’ve already seen the downside of total recall, there are a few other disadvantages associated with this gift.
Decker relies on the accuracy of his memory because he believes it is an objective source of information. However, he cannot trust everything that his inner DVR shows him: “Even though he had perfect recall, sometimes his mind, just like anyone else’s, turned words into what it thought they should be instead of what they actually had been” (335).
Even in instances when he is correctly remembering facts, Decker still needs to interpret their meaning. Regarding Wyatt’s vendetta against him, Decker already possesses the key incident in his inner DVR that triggered her rage, but he needs context to interpret its meaning: “Apparently his perfect mind had flaws, because this memory, while always there, had not made an impression on him. He had glossed right over it until he hadn’t glossed right over it” (374).
He only begins to make headway when he understands Wyatt’s life and reason for seeking revenge against Decker. Objective fact only achieves meaning in the light of subjective motivation:
A plastic cop. Not a real cop. A cop who hurt you. Giles Evers. And from my words, you lumped me right in with him. And maybe I can understand that, because right at that moment you probably were the most vulnerable you would ever be (375).
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