Comparative Essay Assignment Planning: Use of memory in ULB and SOW

[Atomisation – Splitting up of an individual. Completely disintegrating]

Main Points of Essay...

1. Memory changes surround environment
   Kien
   ~ Jungle of Screaming Souls – renamed after war. Forever associated with war.
   
   Tereza
   ~ Pg160 - “The streets and buildings could no longer return to their original names”; “a Czech spa suddenly metamorphosed into a miniature imaginary Russia
   
   
2. Memory is being used as a miserable reminder to time past – “eternal return”
   Kien
   ~ “We’re prisoners to our shared memories of wonderful times together”- Phuong pg77
   ~ Kien struggles from nightmares constantly hurtling him back into wartime.
   
   Tereza
   ~ Memories of her family background keep reoccurring. In particular, the memory of her vulgar mother who enjoys humiliating Tereza. This memory forces Tereza to repulse characteristically from her mother and the thought of similarities especially physical dishearten Tereza.
   ~ Struggles from troubling dreams where she is forced to relive her worries and bad experiences from the past.
   
   
3. Memory is being used to divide the individual
   Kien
   ~ Kien cannot make sense of everything, of all his memories and pain until he has written them down.
   ~ War tints every happy memory that Kien has.
   ~ The act of remembering drives Kien into deep depression~
   ~ "It was a sadness...a pain which could send one soaring back into a pass”
   ~ “nostalgia drove him into the depths of his imagination” – writing becomes the evocation of memory
   
   Tereza
   ~ The act of remembering drives Tereza into paranoia. Example of this – Memory of infidelity with engineer haunts Tereza
   ~ The memory of abuse of her mother forces Tereza’s radical split between body and soul; as much as she rejects her body, it is her soul she gives to Tomas.

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More Ideas to Consider....

The Sorrow of War

· Kien -
~ Driven by memory and structured by vignettes.
~ Ways in which memory is described:- road [“looking back down the road of his past...”]; river
~ “The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person.”
~ The polarising effect of war: the paradox of war --- memory carries this in the book (prominent themes mindmap)