Ciara's Final Reaction

The book started out discussing the idea of memories and time and history, and it ended that way as well. 

Throughout the novel, Tony finds himself remembering people based on outdated relationships he had with them long ago.  Tony is not one to delve; he does what he was supposed to: nothing more, nothing less.  His relationships with people are very much on the surface, and it does not help that he is quiet coy and reserved as well.  Tony forms these ideas of people based on the limited interactions he had with them, and these ideas develop into memories.  What we have as memories eventually becomes history, not only to ourselves, but to the people we share them with as well.  Tony was so sure about his memories and never questioned their validity, but as he got older he became more skeptical about their soundness. 

Tony says at one point: “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves”.  In my opinion, this quote exemplifies the message of the book.  We often alter our life experiences as we go along, most times subconsciously.  We pick and choose, switch around, cut and paste the details of our lives with no one to challenge these changes because they are so and intricate and inconspicuous.  After a while, these embellishments become our memories, and soon after, they become history.  All the stories Tony tells Margaret about Adrian, Veronica, and her family are solely provided by Tony; Adrian and Sarah are dead, and Veronica will barely speak with him.

There was a question of legitimacy in the book, similarly to NFTU.  As Tony finds out more about Adrian, Veronica, and her family, he begins to question the memories he had of them.  For example, though he had convinced himself that Veronica was a witch of a woman that he would never want to be in contact with again, he began falling for her at the end of the novel.  As the reader, I was never sure whether or not to believe Tony’s description of a person or his relationship with them, because Tony was not sure whether his memory was objective or distorted either.

Tony’s journey in this book is as follows: he realizes that his memories may not accurately represent the past, and he must try to make amends for his decisions based on these false memories before he dies and they become an inexpungible part of history: a history he created.