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Summary
Themes
and Colors
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.
Active
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.
Active
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.
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?
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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.
Active
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.
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.
Active
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.
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.
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.
