Nostalgia In Mary Karr's Still Memory

Memories are dear fragments of the past connecting it to the present through a sense of nostalgia. These links are what keep us grounded to reality and allow us to progress through life. In the poem “Still Memory” by Mary Karr, the author portrays the memory of a child suffering from anterograde amnesia, an ailment defined as the loss of the ability to create memories after an event that caused amnesia. Thus, the theme of the poem is the attempt to retain and remember the memories and events that transpire throughout the child’s life. This is shown through a use of imagery and diction. This poem is comprised mainly of imagery through which the author is able to convey the need to preserve the actions going on around the narrator. The lines, “my father in the doorway, not dead, just home from the graveyard shift smelling of crude

This is significant because the narrator is unable to remember such actions, despite the repetitiveness of it all, and must keep a recording of even the basic little tendencies of each and every last individual. Then in the next part of that line, “My house starts to throb in its old socket,” the narrator’s home is described more life-like to indicate that, although the narrator does not remember the routine of his household or any others, this is the only setting that is important to them at this time. This is the narrator’s home and as such the narrator feels a sort of obligation to care about the happenings here even if they may not remember them tomorrow. These prime examples of imagery and diction are what gives the sense of the need to retain potentially lost memories. We as people do not want to let go of the past as it is what connects us to the future. It is as Haruki Murakami says “No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those