Remember vs. forget in Emma Healey's Elizabeth is missing and Pat Barker's Regeneration

her memories, these soldiers are paralyzed with fear that these memories will return.

Both narratives imitate the rhythm and cycles in the work of memory: at times, while reading these novels, you get a feeling that you are caught in an unending cycle of memories coming back and disappearing again. Interestingly, in Regeneration it is not just one person who does the work of remembering, but many – the lost memories of different soldiers are intertwined so that we perceive them as a single whole, as common suffering. Prior, who is treated with hypnosis in order to help him regain his powers of speech, seems to be bearing the weight of the memories of all the other soldiers who appear in the novel before he does.

Another memory-related motive found in both novels is the healing power of memory or, to be more precise, of remembering. Maud is trying to heal herself by remembering what happened to her sister, Dr.Rivers believes that his patients will get better if they remember and can speak about their memories. The past needs to be REgenerated and reconstructed for traumatized people to be able to move on with their lives. However, while in Elizabeth is Missing , remembering is seen as unequivocally a force for good, for some characters in Regeneration, it eventually turns out that sometimes memory loss is the only way to survive: like a surgical thread or adhesive plaster it keeps the wound from reopening. The terror of war experiences makes them unspeakable, which is why Prior keeps silent.

In Elizabeth is Missing , two intertwined time layers resemble intersecting Euler circles, where past and present are connected by means of different objects that inevitably trigger memories. At first sight, all of these things, be it a compact lid, lipstick or marrows, seem to be random details unrelated to each other, but they turn out to represent both ‘deleted’ memories and mark the pivotal moments of the plot. Maud’s memory is shown as driven by these small ‘clues’. In the case of Regeneration, we mostly see what is happening through Dr.Rivers’s eyes, who, while trying to help his patients, seems to be constantly drifting between the pre-war past and present. In Barker’s novel there is no such consistent and comprehensive system of ‘clues’ as in Healey’s novel: for Rivers, it is sometimes a word or an action or a mental image that sets him thinking about his own past or about his patient’s past (for example, Prior’s emotional outburst makes Rivers remember about his own childhood and an episode with a nanny goat).

To conclude, both of these books have a number of things in common in the way they deal with the theme of memory and use the forgetting/remembering motive on different levels of the narrative structure. Pat Barker’s novel, however, presents a much more complex and controversial picture: unlike Maud in Elizabeth is Missing , for some of her characters ‘total recall’ is not the key to achieving peace with themselves as she raises the question of how one can continue living after remembering something as horrible as one’s war experiences.

Adeola Aisha Bello

2nd Year student, International Relations

Perm State University

The Beauty of Literature in Rachel Joyce’s Stories

The book A Snow Garden and Other Stories by Rachel Joyce is a series of stories based on the miracle of a holiday which is Christmas, that reflects the lives of different people, connected through relationships, friendship, circumstances. It also shows how even with people being the center of their stories they are just supporting characters in another person’s story no matter who they are or what they are going through.

One of my personal favorites of this book is ‘Christmas Day at the Airport’. This is one of the stories that stood out to me because it really showcases the modern reality that we all live in, its structure, functioning and its problems and it has some astonishing literary devices like allegory, imagery, metaphor, retrospection.

The story talks about the different lives of people of different origins (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, type of homes) and things/events that determine their characters. It shows all of them caught up in an unfortunate turn of events and how they all came together at the end due to the positive actions of one or two persons (for instance, Hester and Mrs. Pikes) and a miracle. It centers around two immigrants, same sex couple. Here we can see a societal problem of