Most people are very convinced that they have memories of past experiences because of the event itself or the bigger picture of the experience. According to Ulric Neisser, memories focus on the fact that the events outlined at one level of analysis may be components of other, larger events (Rubin 1). For instance, one will only remember receiving the letter of admission as their memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia. However, people do not realize that it is actually the small details that make up their memories. What make up the memory of being accepted into the University of Virginia are the hours spent on writing essays, the anxiety faced due to fear of not making into the university and the happiness upon hearing your admission into the school; these small details are very important in creating memories of this experience. If people’s minds are preset on merely thinking that memories are the general idea of their experiences, memories become very superficial and people will miss out on what matters most in life. Therefore, in “The Amityville Horror”, Jay Anson deliberately includes small details that are unnecessary in the story to prove that only memory can give meaning to life.
In this story, there are many small details. Anson includes a lot of small details in character descriptions such as “Father Mancuso turned away from his window. His head hurt. His stomach pained from the flu cramps. The priest was perspiring” (75) and “A man, who looked to be anywhere from thirty-five to forty-five because of his receding hairline was standing there with a hesitant smile on his face. His features were coarse and his nose was red from the cold” (42). Other small details include Kathy’s actions throughout the story....
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...ories at 112 Ocean Avenue and this makes them change their life drastically; they decide to move to the other end of the country. Life is short, so one should start creating good memories promptly in order to live a meaningful and fulfilled life.
Works Cited
Anson, Jay. The Amityville Horror. New York: Pocket, 1977. Print.
Mcgaugh, James L., and Aurora LePort. “Remembrance Of All Things Past.” Scientific
American 310.2 (2014): 40-45. Academic Search Complete. Web. 3 May 2014.
My Amityville Horror. Dir. Eric Walter. Perf. Daniel Lutz, Susan Bartell, Laura DiDio.
Film Regions International, Inc and Lost Witness Pictures, LLC, 2011. Documentary.
Ranpura, Ashish. "How we remember, and why we forget." Brain Connection (2000).
Rubin, David C. “Nested Structure in Autobiographical Memory.” Autobiographical Memory.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. 71-81. Print.
Ann Rinaldi has written many books for young teenagers, she is an Award winning author who writes stories of American history and makes them become real to the readers. She has written many other books such as A Break with Charity, A Ride into Morning, and Cast two Shadows, etc. She was born in New York City on August 27, 1934. In 1979, at the age of 45, she finished her first book.
Man must not only remember his past, but also choose to remember it as it really happened—for, to again quote Eliot, “What might have been is an abstraction" (175). Fantasizing about an abstract, idealized past will never give success i...
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Memory is an important part of our lives. It fills us with comfort, warmth, and happiness when recalling a joyous event; it may also illicit feelings of anger, sadness, or discontent. Unfortunately, our memory is not as perfect as we may think. In fact, our memory is extremely malleable. Most people think memory acts as a tape recorder; you experience an event, and like a video tape, you can replay the event over and over in exact detail as it happened. This belief could not be further from the truth. In fact, our memory is constantly being shaped by external factors. It is reconstructed in the way we want to remember it. Memory does not act as a tape recorder; rather it is constructed by us and warped by time, emotions, and external forces. Such forces can include the input of family members and friends who want “get the facts straight” with their recollection of the event. This falsification effect can have severely damaging consequences, not only for the person undergoing the recollection, but also for those under attack for these recovered memories.
As I have been reading memoirs about memory for this class, each essay made me recall or even examine my past memory closely. However, the more minutely I tried to recall what happened in the past, the more confused I got because I could not see the clear image and believe I get lost in my own memory, which I thought, I have preserved perfectly in my brain. The loss of the details in each memory has made me a little bit sentimental, feeling like losing something important in my life. But, upon reading those essays, I came to realize that remembering correct the past is not as important as growing up within memory. However, the feelings that were acquired from the past experience tend to linger distinctly. The essay that is related to my experience
When we asked the question of how we remember, forget, and learn has been the topic of lots of discussions. Examining how importantly the successes and fails of our memory skills affect our lives, this interest seems exceedingly justified. We count on our memories for lots of what we do like whenever we do identifying, appreciating, and responding right according to the objects and persons we interact in our environment and to the actions in which we take part in writing, speaking, reading, or else communicating in thinking, reasoning, and problem solving, and also to recall the past about our experiences. That is our memory, which holds, and allows us to use, the knowledge we have get about ourselves and the life and that catches the ways in which we have configured to the world so as to better cope with it. There is so much we de...
It has been stated that the application of memory functions in fictional works which act as a reflective device of human experience. (Lavenne, et al. 2005: 1). I intend to discuss the role of memory and recollection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005).
In addition to sorrow and sympathy, with memories one can also obtain an immense amount of knowledge and wisdom. With certain memories of loss and fail, one can prevent the mishaps that might occur in the future. For example, when the ...
Mollon, Phil. Remembering Trauma : A Psychotherapist's Guide To Memory And Illusion. London: Whurr, 2002. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
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