Alice Bennett
Zimmerman
English
1 December 2018
The Importance of Memories in Station Eleven
“Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque… it is memory that will save humanity.” These words, spoken by Elie Wiesel are proven true in Emily Mandel’s book Station Eleven. Through Mandel’s non linear technique she shows the reader that memory is more important than experience. Station Eleven is written out of order timeline-wise, the book jumps around through large clumps of years, and the reader will see later events first and earlier events later. This shows the reader the sequence of memories and the importance of them, and how the timeline and experience is not as important.
Humans tend to find comfort in memories, we go back to our best ones in times of struggle, and they can serve as a source of hope. In Station Eleven, one of the main characters Kirsten, often times goes through houses looking for things from the pre-collapse time. In the part The Airplanes, August and Kirsten are looking through the house, and afterwards it’s described that they were “resting and flipping through a stack of magazines that Kirsten had taken from the house… In the last magazine Kirsten found another ex wife. A photograph of a woman in her late thirties or early forties with a hat pulled low, glaring at the camera as she exited a building ” (Mandel 200). Kirsten took a pile of magazines from the house with the intention to look through them and find happy photos and things that would remind her of days pre-collapse. Kirsten wants to keep these memories because losing them could cause a sense of anxiety in her. Kirsten also cannot remember anything from the first year, and she is glad she can’t, since it would be too traumatic for her as her parents died and she was alone with her brother during the first year.
Memories of trauma and/or childhood memories can also impact people. The reader can see this through the character Tyler who then becomes the prophet. Tyler is Arthur Leander’s son, but his father wasn’t present during his fatherhood. When the collapse started he started living in the Severn City airport and then starts to become really religious and ends up joining a cult to become the prophet. As the prophet he has several wives which oddly mirrors how his father Arthur hopped from wife to wife. In chapter twelve, Arthur is talking about his beliefs as the prophet and what he believes the true reason of the flu is, "The flu," the prophet said, "the great cleansing that we suffered twenty years ago, that flu was our flood. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters, and I submit that we were saved"—his voice was rising—"not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light. We were saved because we are the light. We are the pure" (60). Tyler was raised during the collapse, which would be very traumatic for a child, and the memories from the early days of his childhood with his father impacted how he saw the world later in life.
During the collapse people started to group together. Some communities decided to not teach the children what life was like pre collapse, and opposite of that, some people preserve their memories of the pre collapse era like Clark with the Museum of Civilization. In chapter eighteen, Raymonde says “Some towns, as I was saying, some towns are like this one, where they want to talk about what happened. Other towns, discussion of the past is discouraged. We went to a place once where the children didn't know the world had ever been different, although you'd think all the rusted-out automobiles and telephones wires would give them a clue” (115). People born post collapse must rely on those born before, those who remember and choose to tell them. This shows the importance of communal memory. These memories are fragile, something that experience can not replace in the post collapse era. Raymode says that there are some places where the post collapse time is all the children know, and they think that’s how the world always was since no one taught them anything else. This shows that communities and people have the duty to pass down memories and knowledge and preserve them, and that’s more important than experience. All of history is based off memory, and without the children being taught about before the collapse, they are given no hope.
Because Station Eleven is written out of sequence the book places an emphasis on the importance of memories and how they shape us and our communities. The current experiences that people are facing during the post collapse era don’t equate to the knowledge preserved and memories from the pre collapse era. Memories are powerful to the human mind, we can find comfort or hope in them, and early memories often influence what we do later in life.
Works Cited