Week 2 Assignment
LTRE – 422 Devry University
Kaixuan Chen
7/21/12
Professor B Cameron MacKenzie

In Memento Mori by Nathan Nolan, at the beginning of the story, the protagonist wakes up in a mental hospital with little known information about him , other than that his wife is dead and he is diagnosed with Amnesia and can not remember anything past 10 minutes, remarking himself as the “ten-minute man”. He leaves numbers of notes and pictures around the room to remind him that the daily activities such as brushing his teeth, also often reminding him that he went to his wife’s funeral and that his brain has been damaged. Earl is also the first person narrator within the short story; the notes are him philosophically explaining what happened with his condition and how his memory is so fresh that he can never forget his wife’s rape and murder. These series of notes later during the story become more motivational and congratulatory. Nathan Nolan also shows an interesting way of Earl’s character development alternating between the both first person and third person perspective of how Earl looks at himself and his “backwards amnesia”. The writer leads the reader to go into his position of having amnesia and creating a sense of us having his short term memory loss. His physical body consists of tattoos of information, instructions, and a sketch of a man’s face which we assume is murderer of Earl’s wife. One tattoo has the words “I RAPED AND KILLED YOUR WIFE”. The short story tells us other little info about his physical details, they state that he has gotten older near the end, and the “hair pulling back away from his head like solar flares”. In the end of the short story, we readers find out that he is in a hotel room near the killer and prepares to go after him later skipping to Earl either in a cab or a cop car, leaving the killers body. It is ironic for Earl in this scene because of his anterograde amnesia his mental and emotional state causes him to forget everything after his wife rape and murder, he rushes to find his pen but fails and forgets that he has revenged his wife successfully . Thus, repeating the cycle and backwards amnesia. The cycle will restart with him looking at his tattoo of the man’s face and the memory will refresh into his brain. He will then try to get revenge on an impossible situation.

References
Bordwell. (2011). Film art.
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Week 2 Memento Mori

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