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The Amnesia Gambit 12/17/2014 7:40:24 AM
This post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com.
How memorable is amnesia as a plot device?
Go ahead and groan, I’ll wait. Also, spoilers ahead.
Amnesia, the loss of memory usually due to trauma, isn’t all that common in the real world. Chances are that, absent a serious head injury, no one you know has suffered from it. Unless you were a soap opera character in the 1980s, in which case half the people you knew were afflicted by amnesia at one time or another. Some more than once.
Amnesia and other forms of memory loss, as a plot device, tend to turn up quite often in novels, especially thrillers and mysteries. Novels are all about dramatic tension. The plot requires obstacles for the protagonist to overcome on the way to his ultimate goal.
Amnesia or memory loss can serve a variety of different dramatic goals. In a detective story, amnesia can add to the “degree of difficulty” in unraveling a mystery. For example, in James R. Benn’s Blood Alone, part of the Billy Boyle series of World War II mysteries, Billy woke up in Sicily during a battle with no memory of who he was or how he got there. A head trauma left Billy with amnesia. Over the course of the novel, Billy pieced together both his own identity and what he’d been up to in the days before his injury. Billy’s memory loss reframed what would otherwise have been an espionage plot as a mystery. Billy had two major questions to answer: who was he and what was he supposed to be doing?
Billy’s piecing together his own identity is another use of amnesia. It allows the author to explore the nature of a character in a way that’s more dramatically visceral. Instead of the narrator telling you “the character is like this,” the reader gets a more dramatic presentation of the character’s nature via the action of the story.
Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity is a classic example of the use of amnesia for multiple plot purposes. A man wakes up in Switzerland with no memory of who he is. People are trying to kill him. He believes he’s a man named Jason Bourne. He tries to outwit his pursuers, figure out who he is and why people might want to kill him. For good measure, when he encounters someone new, he has no idea if the person might be an ally or an enemy. Ken Follett’s Code to Zero used a similar gambit. The rocket scientist hero awoke amidst a Soviet plot against the early U.S. space program with no memory of his life. He raced to piece together not only his past but which of the many people around him might be traitors.
Amnesia can also be deployed to put an otherwise steady character off balance. In Robert McCammon’s The River of Souls, series hero Matthew Corbett was left with no memory after a climactic fight. With friends and allies believing him dead, the amnesiac Matthew was left at the mercy of an enemy who led him into a potentially lethal cliffhanger.
Like any plot device, amnesia can become trite when used too often or in too obvious a way. Some books have found clever spins on the trope. In All Around the Town, Mary Higgins Clark used repressed memories of a traumatic childhood abduction as a crucial element in the mystery of a young woman accused of murder. In Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a middle-aged man recalled the magical beings who lived next door to him as a child and a terrifying chapter from his youth. The climactic twist indicated this wasn’t the first time the hero had remembered and been made to forget his past.
Jasper Fforde pulled off an entertaining variation on a theme that used a lot of the elements of an amnesia plot without using amnesia. One of Our Thursdays Is Missing was a lively entry in his long-running Thursday Next series. In that story, the fictional version of Thursday, who lived in the Book World and starred in a series of novels about the heroine, had to put herself in the shoes of her real world inspiration and unravel a mystery the real Thursday had been running down when she disappeared. Like in an amnesia plot, Book World Thursday had to discover her true strengths and character and unravel events that had occurred to someone like her of which she had no clue. It was an interesting variation on a classic trope that dusted off familiar elements and used them in a unique and entertaining way.
As with any plot device, the use of amnesia in a story will depend on how creatively the author deploys it. If used as a cheap shorthand, don’t be shocked if fans roll their eyes and sneer. But when deployed in a way that finds a creative new angle on an old trope, amnesia might just make a story hard to forget.
