“A Memory” showcases the narrator’s growing awareness of the divide between her internal and external worlds and how they are increasingly at odds. The narrator is obsessed with making observations about the world around her, but through these observations she is also forced to confront the limitations of her own perceptions. Initially, the act of making frames with her fingers makes these limitations literal, as the frames create actual constraints and boundaries around what she sees. The narrator is admittedly reluctant to let go of her preconceived ideas. As a result, the way she watches the world is characterized by a certain “intensity” and “austerity”—that is, she is perpetually alert and eagerly awaiting some kind of important revelation about life, but she’s also terrified that what she’ll learn might shatter her prior assumptions.
In this way, the story brings to light the tension that exists between reality and how one perceives reality. The narrator herself embodies this tension, since she describes herself as both “observer and dreamer.” Throughout the story, Welty repeatedly draws attention to the internal clashes that occur when the narrator becomes conscious of the disconnect between reality and her perception of it. For example, when the boy she loves gets a nosebleed in class, the narrator is faced with the unexpectedly messy reality of his humanness (that he has a body and that it bleeds) and is so shocked by this experience that she faints. Her shock is ultimately due to the fact that the messiness of this reality contrasts so sharply with the way the boy has existed in her imagination—as an abstraction, largely disconnected from the real world. Later on, while she is lying on the beach, the narrator has a similar experience, as she’s ultimately forced to confront yet another ugly reality embodied by the family of bathers: the reality that love sometimes looks chaotic and unappealing. Not only do the bathers’ noisy interactions yank the narrator from the solace of her daydream, but their physical features challenge her ideas about beauty, etiquette, and decency. This is most evident in the “peak of horror” she experiences when the older woman dumps wet sand from her swimsuit. In this way, the story suggests that the narrator struggles to accept reality for what it is, especially when it challenges her hopes and expectations.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality vs. Perception ThemeTracker
Reality vs. Perception Quotes in A Memory
From my position, I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible. Ever since I had begun taking painting lessons, I had made small frames with my fingers, to look out at everything.
My love had somehow made me doubly austere in my observations of what went on about me. Through some intensity I had come almost into a dual life, as observer and dreamer. I felt a necessity for absolute conformity to my ideas in any happening I witnessed.
But this small happening which had closed in upon my friend was a tremendous shock to me; it was unforeseen, but at the same time dreaded; I recognized it, and suddenly I leaned heavily on my arm and fainted.
But like a needle going in and out among my thoughts were the children running on the sand, the upthrust oak trees growing over the clean pointed roof of the white pavilion, and the slowly changing attitudes of the grown-up people who had avoided the city and were lying prone and laughing on the water’s edge.
The man smiled, the way panting dogs seem to be smiling, and gazed about carelessly at them all and out over the water. He even looked at me, and included me. Looking back, stunned, I wished that they all were dead.
I felt a peak of horror, as though her breasts themselves had turned to sand, as though they were of no importance at all and she did not care.
Still I lay there, feeling victimized by the sight of the unfinished bullwark where they had piled and shaped the wet sand around their bodies, which changed the appearance of the beach like the ravages of a storm. I looked away, and for the object which met my eye, the small worn white pavilion, I felt pity suddenly overtake me, and I burst into tears.
