this is the response for "amnesia". it is late probably because I've had something like it for the past three weeks.
Amnesia was one of the cooler readings we've had in this class. I thought the story was incredibly imaginative, which is just my cup of tea. I guess whenever I reach into my memory I pull out some small visual cue to help me really take in what I'm feeling. It opens worlds of events that are all happening at the same time. The story sort of resembled Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. In it, Billy, denounces the idea of time and things ending by explaining how he lives in separate parts of his life that pick up where he left them just by visiting them in his memories. I feel like this idea of memory really expanded my horizons on the idea that nothing really ends and that worlds and worlds are stored in memories.
The lines “all of the stories feeding into my life are fragmenting the integrity of my voice; I hear myself telling other people’s stories as if they were my own, and I feel certain that there are other people out there, people I hardly know, telling mine. I am a confluence of stolen narratives, and my own story has been stolen too and fed through a foreign mouth into foreign ears.” Really influenced me too, I think this is an accurate way of seeing people: “a confluence of stolen narratives”. When I think of it, I know stories about many people fictional and real and many worlds.
I also liked that the tying in of the story of the boy, the man and the poet running at the same time sort of played into what we were asked to try to explore in our most recent assignment. Well I guess it “really” did, not “sort of”, which is why we were asked to explore it.
I also like that it came from Toronto, as I'm generally a big fan of homegrown stories.
image from slaughterhouse 5:
