Theme of Memory in Station Eleven Essay Sample

Memory can bring back those pleasant moments in times of great catastrophe. In Station Eleven, by Emily Mandel, there are many moments where having memories of the previous world can be comforting. It is about how memories can influence people in the world of a pandemic, where it can occasionally bring hope to people for them to maintain that memory of that beautiful place or moment—motivating them to continue working through those hard times so that they can come back to that world of joy and peace one day. The author takes the opportunity to give the characters an event that they have to overcome, even if there are times where they have lost all hopes. As we know it, she takes the world and changes it to a collapsed world, where there are only a few people that have survived. The Georgia flu shortly appeared after a few of the characters went through their first hard time. One of the main characters, Arthur, goes through a heart attack, leaving the rest with great fear and worry. The flu was spreading rapidly with all the symptoms that wiped the world’s population that we once knew. 

In today’s world, multiple events demonstrate how memories influence people in some type of way. One event illustrates how simple things can recall old memories. The novel compares and contrasts events before and after the life of a pandemic throughout all the characters that had survived. For instance, one of the characters, Kristen, a young eight-year-old girl, wanders into the Traveling Symphony, a group of artists who travel through settlements of survivors to perform plays. She tries to find anything in the world, after the pandemic, that might trigger her mind to preserve the memories of the previous world alive and find some kind of comfort through them. Then she finds some comics in an abandoned house, making her remember some part of the memory, but she does not remember what her friend, Jeevan, said to her exactly. Even tho that might be true, she still finds some comfort in remembering an action that Jeevan took place in before the collapse of the world as we know it. That gave her some kind of hope or kindness to the extent that she finds that memory so precious. Whenever she finds other magazines or comics, she will remember that moment in her life to avoid the conflicts that are happening in the world that she is currently in. “Nothing in Kristen’s collection suggested the Arthur Leander she remembered, but what did actually remember? Arthur was a fleeting impression of kindness and gray hair, a man who’d once pressed two comics books intro he hands– I have a present for you, she was almost certain he’d said– and sometime after this moment, the clearest memory she retrained from before the collapse.” (Mandel.41) This shows how simple things, such as comic books, can trigger the mind to find memories of the world Kristen used to know and want to keep intact with, based on the fact that by doing so, she can find hope and some kind of comfort to avoid the current situation that she might be in. People tend to forget memories of the past entirely, where Kristen forgets what one of the people that took care of her said and how the person’s personality was at that moment. Also, that is why during Kristen’s journey with the symphony, she tends to find anything from the previous world that might bring her memories back, because if someone loses that kind of memory, it can create some kind of anxiety. 

In the modern world, we all know that we cannot remember all the things that happened during our childhood, it can be tough to try to remember everything in detail, and people tend to give up doing so. Kristen is a perfect example of that since she forgot some of the aspects of her previous world. “How could you not remember something like that?’ It was beautiful, “I was eight’ Alexandra nodded, unsatisfied and obviously thinking that if she’d seen a lit-up computer when she was eight, she’d have remember it” ( Mandel, 39). Since people tend to lose part of their memories in life constantly, there are some occasions when something might affect a person’s mind. For Kristen, it was the fact that she was just too young, and she might have seen one, but since time passed by, she forgot. In the real world today, even if people tend to remember those joyful moments before the pandemic, it can sometimes give some kind of sadness or anxiety because people started to lose hope at the end of this pandemic. Covid-19 turned the world upside down two long years ago, and the omicron variant is giving us something new to worry about in the coming year. Meanwhile, the pandemic is still prompting people to withdraw from social activities, and many continue to work from homes, with weekdays blurring into weekends, month after month. With all this stress, social isolation and disruption, it is no wonder that people have been feeling the effects of being more forgetful or absent-minded. “If we’re under a lot of stress, sometimes it can very negatively impact retrieval of information,” said Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology and director of the Schacter Memory Lab at Harvard University.”  People are social creatures, and all that social distancing can take a toll on our mental health and memory function. 

Even tho some memories might bring hope and comfort to some people, the thought that losing them can cause anxiety of not knowing what happened to them precisely at that moment. There are some memories that people tend to want to forget completely, based on the fact that they caused some kind of trauma to the person. For instance, Tyler, Arthur’s son, became the corrupted prophet that he is, based on the influence of other people and the trauma that he had when he thought of any possible reason why his father left him and his mother before the pandemic even started. In addition, that trauma made him come one step closer to a sociopath since it corrupted his mind to the point where he used faith to force people to follow his wills in the pandemic world, and if not, they were killed. “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.’” (Mandel 60). This shows how his past trauma made him so cold-hearted that he completed forgot all memory of his past life and now believes that he only has a memory of being the chosen one that would guide people through the pandemic and save them. Even tho Tyler thinks that he has overcome his past trauma, we can still see how the past trauma affects him as a person since he came from being a kind person to a corrupted prophet in the end. From that, we can infer the fact that the memory is still a part of Tyler’s mind. 

In conclusion, memories of the past can be comforting to people in times of great tragedy and help them find hope. In addition, the idea is that if they keep working hard through those hard times, somehow they will come back to a place of peace. For instance, Kristen found comfort in things that she encounters during the pandemic that reminds her of the previous world, that she wants to keep vivid, hoping that everything would someday return to normal. However, the fact that she needs those reminders means that people, like her, tend to forget memories from the past and have this constant need for some type of object to remind her of the life that she once had. However, on some occasions, like the fact that she was young explains why she does not remember every single detail of what exactly happened in the past or that she might not pay close attention to what happened in the past. Even though all the prior might be true about memories, there are still some memories that tend to be forgotten, like with Tyler’s case, that made him have some kind of trauma that later on makes him convert to a corrupt prophet.