"The Remembered Self" by Jermoe Bruner

Summeary by Chelsea Holt

January 24, 2007

Think back to a fond memory from your early childhood, think back to a time in your youth that you can now realize was a turning point in your life; What do you see? I see the first time I met my best friend in the third grade. We were both new in school and I remember her so clearly it was like yesterday. She was sitting in the classroom in a white dress with the sun beaming down on her, I remember thinking that we would be friends forever. I now realize that at the very moment that I met her we were not the best of friends, hardly, we went through a phase where we despised each other. So, why is it that every time I think of Sara I remember the little girl in the white dress that I was an instant friend with? Because to me the image of the young girl and the friendship that to this day I cherish somehow solidifies my youth and my ability to make friends.

To have the chance to write a book about you life while looking back upon every moment allows the author the opportunity to solidify the moments in their lives that they deem important. Allie Calhoun is a classic example of the remembered self. The story that is laid befor the viewer is one that has been filtered through a woman that can pinpoint the moments that made her the person that she grew to become, she knows what moments made up her personal self. Every person is living and creating “a complex mental edifice, that one can simply remember (p.41) Why do we chose to remember the things that we do? Does our mind simply absorbs at random or is there something deeper being formed, memories of our first bike rides and first kisses. Do we understand at the time that we are experiencing these turning points and that we are forming a new self, a self that is different from our previous self and even different from our future self.

At this point in my life I have come to realize the fragility of my memory and I recognize the moments that I want to remember and I sometimes recognize moments that will be lost to me. Allie Calhoun paints a beautiful picture of who she was, but how accurate could the human mind be when confronted with the need to relay its every observation, because it's not just what stands out to us that makes up the it's every minute detail in our everyday lives.

The moments that are observable in the Notebook help the viewer follow the emotional rollercoaster that Allie and Noah are experiencing. The moon stood out to both the main character and the viewer because the moon is thought to carry great powers and that people can not control their emotions during a full lunar cycle. Whether or not our memories are completely accurate to the actual events that play our in our lives is irrelevant, it only truly matters who we become because of these events. This point does not ring true for Allie though, she uses her memories to pull together the self that she is loosing due to Alzheimer's. By hearing her past she is able o grasp a small part of the person that she has forgotten she was.

By losing our past, do we lose our selves? In a matter of reason, we would. Allie had completely forgotten the person she was, almost like that part of herself died, but by experiencing fully the moments that were important to her, she reformulated the self that she was when she was with Noah. Without Allie's ability to distinguish the truly important moments in her life she would have lost those and all other memories to the disease, therefore losing what little time she had left.

While the story of The Notebook is a great one, the self-as-story account that Bruner plays out is just an account of how we should function. To store an entire lifetime in one person's memory is impossible. I feel that Bruner simply points out yet another shortfall in how our mind works without taking into account the anomalies that the mind can produce. The Notebook is an account of a great romance that deserved to be remembered, and a person would do anything to remember the self that they are or were. We are the narrators to our own life.