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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Memory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory and Meaning
Reality vs. Perception
Childhood Love, Innocence, and Growing Up
Summary
Analysis
The narrator recalls a time when, as a child, she was lying on a beach near a lake after a swim on a summer morning. Having recently begun taking painting lessons, she uses her fingers to create a rectangular frame through which to make observations. At this age, she is quick to form judgements yet easily terrified by discoveries that do not align with her opinions, hopes, or expectations. Such discoveries plague her with despair. Her mother and father have carefully curated her life up until this point and would be distraught to learn that she thinks this way.
From references to summertime, painting lessons, and the narrator’s parents, readers can intuit that the narrator is a young teenager. This passage introduces the reader to the symbol of the frame, which embodies the limitation of the narrator’s perceptions and ultimately signals her immaturity. Though she is eager to experience new things, the narrator admits to being easily frightened by the new or unexpected. This, combined with the fact that her parents would be upset to learn about her recent emotional experiences, indicates how sheltered her childhood has been and emphasizes her innocence and naivety.
Themes
The narrator regards her impulse to observe so intensely as a necessity. Her observations are tinged with anxiety, as she attempts to draw meaning from everything she encounters, believing that the smallest gestures reveal a “secret of life.” The joy of this search for deeper meaning is intensified by the fact that she is in love for the first time. To this day, she can still recall in perfect detail the moment she brushed the wrist of the boy she loves on the stairs at school. Though she calls him her “friend,” she and this boy have never spoken. Nevertheless, she thinks endlessly about the incident until becoming consumed by its beauty.
This section describes the kind of anxiety that fuels the young narrator’s need to observe. In doing so, it reveals the narrator’s deep discomfort with uncertainty, which she appears to be confronting for the first time in her life. It also becomes clear that she’s somewhat reluctant to let go of her preconceived ideas about life. This opening also introduces the narrator’s memory of first love—encapsulated in the story of the brush in the stairwell. References to this memory’s all-consuming beauty illustrate how memory imbues the narrator’s life with meaning. The different ways that it resurfaces (for example, as an intense emotion) has a profound effect on the narrator’s experience as she moves through the world moment by moment.
Themes
Being in love lends an intensity to the narrator’s observations. It causes her to come into “a dual life, as observer and dreamer.” She vividly remembers the day the boy she loves got a nosebleed in Latin class. This unexpected event sent a shock through her system, causing her to faint. Not knowing any concrete information about the boy’s life, she decided to learn more about him by observing him very closely throughout the rest of the year. To this day, she remembers very minute details about him.
This passage reiterates the narrator’s anxiety about life’s unpredictability by introducing her “dual” engagement with life. The opposition between “observer” and “dreamer” illustrates how, at this stage of development, the narrator is straddling the boundary between the reality she experiences and her perceptions or ideas about reality. Her shock when the boy she loves gets a nosebleed in class happens as a result of the clash between these two parts of her life—she suddenly becomes cognizant of the disconnect between the messiness of his humanity (which she observes in class) and the perfection he previously embodied in her imagination. Understanding that there are new (and perhaps undesirable) things to uncover about his life, she becomes all the more anxious and observant of him. And the depth of her anxiety and obsession is directly linked to her struggles to come to terms with this messy reality.
Themes
Lying on the beach, the narrator continues to think about the incident on the stairs. The memory of this incident weaves through her thoughts “like a needle going in and out.” She then notices a group of “common” people sprawled on the sand nearby. She wonders when and how they got so close to her—did she fall asleep?
This moment builds on the sense of duality at play in the narrator’s life, showing once again that she’s attempting to reconcile two different experiences (one internal and one external). The narrator’s memory of her brush with the boy in the stairs at school is intertwined with her experience on the beach that day. The latter intrudes on her daydream, punctuating it like a sewing needle moving in and out of fabric. Because she specifies that she did not notice when and how the group of sunbathers first appeared on the beach, the reader can intuit that she was completely absorbed by her memory and disconnected from her surroundings. The family’s presence actually pulls the narrator away from her dream state in the same way that one might be startled awake from sleep.
Themes
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The nearby group of bathers is comprised of a man, two women, and two young boys. The boys look to be brothers. The older one is “greatly overgrown,” and the younger boy is small and aggressive. They are running around pinching the others, tossing sand on them, and making obnoxious sounds. The man and the two women are lying together on their sides on the sand. The older woman laughs and stares while the man scoops sand onto her legs. She is fat with white skin and wears an ill-fitting bathing suit. Her laugh is slow and repetitive, and the narrator realizes she has been hearing this laugh unconsciously for some time.
The harshness of the narrator’s descriptions of the sunbathers—of their physicality and of their behavior—indicates her disdain for them. However, based on how she previously characterized herself (as quick to make judgements and easily disturbed by anything that does not line up with her expectations), the reader can assume that these descriptions are not wholly accurate; rather, they are colored by her perceptions. Nevertheless, they importantly illustrate how the narrator currently experiences the bathers’ presence on the beach—as an unwelcome disruption and an affront.
Themes
The younger woman wears a bright green bathing suit. With a “genie-like rage” she watches the man spread sand over the older woman’s legs. The two young boys run wildly about. Though the family do not speak, their attitude and behavior communicate an entrenched sense of “vulgarity and hatred.” The narrator then notices the man put wet sand into the older woman’s swimsuit top, in between her breasts. This causes everyone in their group to laugh, including “the angry girl,” whose laughter brings her to her feet. Pleased with himself, the man shoots a complicit smile all around and makes eye contact with the narrator, “includ[ing]” her in his vulgar play. This absolutely stuns the narrator, and she is filled with contempt for their presence on the beach.
The narrator continues to watch and harshly judge the family of sunbathers. She notices the man place sand in the woman’s bathing suit top, which, for a child as sheltered as the narrator has been, must be rather shocking. What she observes becomes especially horrifying to her when the man makes eye contact and smiles at her. In doing so, he “include[s] her" and calls attention to a shared reality—the fact that he and the narrator do in fact inhabit the same world. It is arguably this fact—more than the bathers’ behavior—that disturbs the narrator most.
Themes
At that moment, the younger woman gets up and begins chasing the two young boys. The smaller boy dives headfirst into the lake to get away, while the larger boy heaves his body over the back of a bench. At this point, the older woman leans over the man and starts to smirk. In a wave of fury, the younger woman runs toward the bench and also jumps over it. The narrator notices the smaller boy pinch her on the waist, after which she angrily pushes him into the sand.
The narrator’s negative perception of the family is emphasized by her vivid description of the ensuing conflict. It is interesting to note the provocative language the narrator uses to accentuate the group’s ugliness while describing what appears simply to be rambunctious play (“senseless,” “jeeringly,” “heavy and ridiculous,” “dragged,” “dig,” etc.). This kind of juxtaposition suggests that she has in fact never before seen people interact in such a way. In this regard, the passage shows that the narrator has had very little experience with people who are different from her. More specifically, it signals her rigidity, her uptightness, and the naivety that generally clouds her vision and results in ungenerous opinions.
Themes
The narrator closes her eyes. She can still see and hear the bathers in her mind’s eye but is attempting to retreat into her “most inner dream”—the memory of the boy and their brush in the stairs at school. She’s unable to fully summon the memory itself, but she is still consumed by the “sweetness” that usually accompanies it. As a result, she is overcome with an unexplained feeling of happiness.
The narrator attempts to call on her memory of the boy in order to shield herself from the ugliness she perceives in the family of sunbathers. There is an obvious tension between the narrator’s internal and external worlds here, as the passage builds on the duality that the story has previously outlined—the narrator’s “dual” existence “as observer and dreamer.” What is especially important to note is that the memory does not reappear in narrative form. Rather, it resurfaces as a feeling and stands in sharp contrast to the narrator’s present reality.
Themes
At one point, the narrator opens her eyes to witness the older woman emptying the wet sand out of her bathing suit. For a moment, she becomes horrified by the thought that the woman’s breasts themselves have turned to sand. When she emerges fully from “the protection of [her] dream,” the beach is empty and the bathers are gone. She feels “victimized” by the physical evidence of the bathers’ presence on the beach, looking at the sand as if it has been “ravage[d]” by a storm. Overtaken by pity at the sight of the beach, she turns away and catches sight of the white pavilion, which causes her to burst into tears.
The family of sunbathers have intruded on the narrator’s peace of mind and challenged her ideas about beauty and decency. The horror she feels when she sees the older woman dump sand from her breasts echoes the shock she experienced when she saw the boy she loves get a nosebleed in Latin class—once again, she is forced to come to terms with the fact that life does not resemble the idealized image she has held in her imagination. The reader understands the profound disappointment this realization brings about when the mere sight of a white pavilion causes her to burst into tears. On one hand, the white pavilion symbolizes of the youthful innocence the narrator is called to leave behind. At the same time, the prevailing sense of self-pity it provokes indicates the narrator’s struggle to truly accept reality for what it is.
Themes
This is the narrator’s last morning on the beach. Continuing to square her fingers and observe her surroundings through frames, she has a vision of the upcoming school year. She imagines seeing the boy she loves at school again, and then she imagines what it will be like in that moment to recall the memory of this hour spent on the beach at the lake. She also envisions the boy’s speechlessness and innocence as his “unconscious eyes” stare back at her—and beyond.
The lingering presence of the frames suggests that the narrator has not fully relinquished her naivety—she remains attached to her limited perspective. Yet the curious manner in which she describes the boy—as innocent and unconscious—establishes distance between the two of them, signaling a shift in her consciousness. She herself is no longer innocent: her eyes have been opened, and she will never see life in quite the same way. Importantly, this passage reiterates the way that memories interact to create layers of meaning. The narrator understands how the memory of innocent young love has shaped her experience on the beach that day. In turn, she knows that her future encounters with the boy will be shaped by the memory of this morning spent on the beach.
Themes
