The narrator of A Chronicle of A Death Foretold returns to the scene of Santiago Nasar's murder many years later to piece together clues. The villagers rely on their memories of the day's tragic events and of the many himself. What happens to memories as we age? Are memories ever reliable? How might memories distort reality, much like a mirror would do? Use examples from real life as well as from the novel.
Memories are definitely not reliable. There's is a thing known as constructive memory, And it happens all the time. For example if asked if someone you saw was wearing a red shirt later you may at first say "I don't know" But eventually your will sub-consciously paint a red shirt into your memory and now you could swear up and down that's what the person was wearing. Also Ones beliefs or opinions may distort reality and ones memory, for example if you think all red heads are thieves, and you work at a store and you see a red head looking at candy, if she goes to get something out of her purse you may think she is or already did steal something, then later if something did come up missing you may "Remember seeing a red head girl take something" even if she really didn't. Just like in this story every one heard that he was going to be killed, but they failed to tell him, and now there trying to piece little by little everything together, its difficult because memory is what you make of it.
ReplyDeleteMemories are not reliable because we see what we want to see and we remember what we want to remember. Everyone knew Santiago Nassar was going to get killed but when you read their description of the day, it is not entirely objective. They have tinged the memory with their personal feelings and then skew the validity of the memory itself. As we age, out memories are changed to match the feeling we had rather than the actual memory. For example, looking back on my trips to Disney, I remember the fun rides but don't remember the long lines and the heat. Memories distort reality because they are always tinged with personal feelings.
ReplyDeleteMemories as we age can become more scrambled and unreliable. They can be lost and hard to retrieve from our memories. I believe our important memories that we can recall exactly are reliable and are what we can base some facts from. Memories might distort reality in that they remember something about the situation and it lead them to believing something else about that situation that is false even though the first memory was right.Just like in this story every one knew that he was going to be killed in advance, even they didn't tell him. Our memories about our relative from our past might change the ways were view them if we are to meet them again now because they were bad.
ReplyDeleteBrandon Day Above
ReplyDeleteAs we age our memories begin to fade and become more and more unreliable. New memories can make it harder for us to remember old things and if an old memory is not constantly thought about then, it will begin to become harder to retrieve and may become distorted. Even if a memory is relatively fresh, it still may not be reliable because we see what we want to see and therefore remember what we want to remember. Our memories may become distorted and false because of our own bias. In a mirror, we do not necessarily see what is actually there and what everyone else sees. Also everything in a mirror is flipped. So memories may become flipped and backwards like an image in a mirror and distorted based on what we want to see and remember.
ReplyDelete-Matthew Greene
As we grow older our capability to remember the exactness of our memories becomes more difficult. However, memories are never exactly reliable because if we are asked questions beforehand and told information then we automatically enter that into our brains and allow ourselves to reconstruct the memory according to what we think. An example of this is when I was asked during the end of the week what I had done the previous weekend. When my sister asked this she also added, "Didn't we watch shows all day?", which allowed me to just simply answer yes because we did watch movies for part of the day, but due to her implying that we did all day I automatically created memories of all day. An example of this from the novel is when some people were "recalling that it was a radiant morning with a sea breeze..." However the following sentence then states, " But most agreed that the weather was funereal, with a cloudy, low sky and the thick smell of still waters.- Alicia Wilson
ReplyDeleteOur memories aren't reliable because we construct them, add things and or remove certain aspects so that they fit the way we want to remember them and if you ask two people of the same event they are going to be different because people add things to events take for example, there was a fight someone would add in something to make it seem different or if they liked someone over the other person they would make that person seem like they won the fight. And how they remembered the day in the book was different for other people.
ReplyDelete~taylor stephen
Memories aren't reliable, at all. People can trick themselves into believing the wrong thing,... is true. As we get older, we regress, its just a fact of life, and with the regression, we put things so far back into our minds, that we can no longer retrieve them, so it's pretty much forgotten. Because of this, we can spit things back out, and sometimes they wont be true. Doing that cause other situations to become discombobulated, and in the end, reality is distorted. For example, who everyone knew Santiago was going to die, and they day they described. When a human decides to say something that happened in the past, theres no way of telling if its the truth or not, because memory isnt concrete.
ReplyDeleteI think our memories have the ability to be altered or changed over time. Sometimes they may be reliable but other times we simply forget and reconstruct memories as best we can. This leads to misremembering. I think we alter our memories at times to make the situation fit our interests or benefit us. For example, whenever I ask people how they did on a test, they tend to remember doing better than they actually did. I think our memories can have a bias at times. - Barack Jordan
ReplyDeleteOver time, memories change and are not as reliable as what you can see today and now. Like a shattered mirror memories become distorted and we beggin to construct our own memories by trying to fill in the blanks. We fill in the blanks without a real assurance of if something really happened. For example, whenenver someone asks my grandmother about when I was born each time to adds ar leaves things out about the account. For a crime scene investigation memories are as reliable as a sea monster eating my house. It is bias and distorted and especially if after twenty seven years have passed. We may give in account so clearly like Santiago Nasar's mother when telling the narrator the smells and how he looked that day. We can not rely on a memory that fades over time. Nothing will be achieved as successful and accurately that way.
ReplyDeleteAs we age and as time goes on our memories becomes less efficient. In psychology there is the forgetting curve by Ebbinghaus it shows as time goes on your memory begins to deflate. As time goes on people begin to construct their own perception of a memory to fit more of what the want it to sound like. Like Charles said memories are bias at times because people tend to remember things how they want to remember them and not like reality and that's what can distort reality. In TOK we read four different history books which all tell the same event in a totally different way and have a totally different view, some favoring different sides and blaming the event on different people. Memory is probably more reliable when someone has no emotion at all attached to the memory. As an example someone could be asked what was 9/11 and someone in America would say it was a very tragic event that affected the whole Country and killed a lot of people, while someone that hates America might say it was a great thing that happened and a few Americans died and it wasn't really a big deal.
ReplyDelete~Haley Rasnick
~Haley Rasnick
As we age our ability to process new memories diminishes, but what is known as crystalline memory is always the same. Memories can be reliable but I don't believe so in stressful situations, because we often fill in the blanks of what we didn't entirely process at that point in time. Memories can, if we've filled in the blanks, make us believe things that aren't even true, such as someone being in a certain place at a certain time when they never actually were. I know that sometimes one of my parents will recall an event that I don't even know about and they'll swear that I was there at the time, but I never was. Judging from that, it's not too safe to rely solely on memories.
ReplyDeleteOur memories fade quickly, especially when they are put in the back of the mind. This allows for constructive memory to alter and complete our memories as we, subconsciously, see fit. This is the main reason eye witness accounts are less condemning in court today. Memories can be reliable in some cases but are not reliable enough to sentence someone to death or life in prison. Trying to recall a memory makes it susceptible to change, in that someone else’s input can add or remove certain aspects from it.
ReplyDelete- Alex Colling
Memories are useless when it comes to recalling specific details and therefore, are unreliable. We think we remember something so detailed, yet there is a possibility that it is a constructed memory. Constructed memories occur often and are unnoticed. Over time, what we think we remember fades, and becomes more and more of a constructed memory. Opinions and beliefs may also distort our memories, making them even further away than what really occurred. Our memories can sometimes be reliable, such as answering yes or no, or true or false questions, which is known as recognition. Recognition is more reliable.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we can really rely on memory, especially in a situation that is not directly related to one's self. If the narrator is asking random villagers to recount a situation in which they were not directly affected, it probably won't hold much value. As we age, memories become based more on emotion rather than real events and the "holes" in the memory get filled in and constructed. Memories can be easily distorted because everyone will perceive the same situation differently, so it's not a common view.
ReplyDelete-Lindsey Tonnesen
With age memories can become a blur due to some diseases or illnesses but there are also some cases where age allows one to have keener memories. Memories are reliable only to a certain extent there are many cases in which memory is not reliable because they can easily be manipulated and constructed. Sometimes when an event takes place a person will remember some of the details but certain things can easily cloud ones memory. Such as, one might confuse what actually happened with what they wanted to happen or with what sounds logical. Memory is too easily manipulated to be trusted sometimes. For example, at the beginning of the book, a person telling someone their memory of a person can lead someone to question their own memory of the person and in most cases alter it.
ReplyDelete-Kayla Barrett
Memories arent reliable because they can fade over time or we cant think different things about memories. Like Haley said about the forgetting curve. As we age memories start to become different from when they first happen, so you cant always trust a memory that was from long ago. Sometimes your mind can change what really happen with the memory to make it seem like that actually happen. You can start to believe what your mind whats you to think. It can alter all it wants as time flies by.
ReplyDeleteAs we get older, our memories do begin to fade away. The longer that a person has had a memory,the more outside events that may influence and obscure our memories. Memory is something that cannot be proven logically. This is why line ups are unreliable sources in a criminal investigation. We lose pieces of our memories over time and we try and fill those missing pieces with what we feel best fits. All humans do this within their lifetime.
ReplyDelete-Ashley Collins
Memory slowly but surely rots away as we get older. Memories can't be trusted. We construct memory to how we want it to be. For example, when me and my friend talked about how we hung out one night and that he was driving, when in reality I was the one driving. Memory can deceive you
ReplyDeleteMemories aren't reliable, especially the older they are. Time distorts them and we also construct things that may or may not have happened. We also tend to remember things with a hindsight bias along with remembering things more positive than they were. With the hindsight bias we think things were more obvious than they were and with the other, we think things were better than they were. Overall, memories can easily be incorrect and blurry. They're similar to a reflection in water, the more you mess with it, the more the reflection is distorted.
ReplyDelete-Krystal Midcap
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