Paper Details

Name: Jaspreet Kaur
Country: India

Year: 2017
Volume: Volume-4, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 16-19

Memory as defined by oxford dictionary is a person’s “ability to remember things” and it also refers to “the period of time that somebody is able to remember events.” Memory, apart from being personal, is also a storehouse or depository for the knowledge of one’s culture and forms a type of a reference book which can be used at anytime in future to look back and elicit any information related to it. Memory is a phenomenon which is “historically conditioned” (Whitehead 4). Thus, it has a history of its own which is temporally and culturally conditioned. Due to different periods and continually changing communities, the definition of memory has become so fluid that its meaning keeps changing. Susannah Radstone talks of “memories” rather than ‘memory,’ as according to her, the memory changes its meaning at different times which evokes Mieke Bal’s notion of memory as a “travelling concept” (Whitehead 3). Modiano in his novel, The Search Warrant (2000) has skillfully used memory as a travelling tool which helps him in slipping into past and present smoothly. This movement wipes out the boundary between the present and the past, and the narrator, by merging the two moments, freely drifts in both time periods.