But I think in this case the specific memory — even if wrong — is permissible, because readers understand the flaws of memory and allow for them.
The one flaw of "At Memory's Edge" is that its introduction and opening chapters are marked by an overly intellectualized rhetoric that is far from the customary clarity and force of Young's prose and may prove a deterrent for the general reader.
All the more poignant, then, to realise that the belligerent Barry, like the adored Ada, suffers from a failure of memory – that his flaws are a result of frailty too.
The Kennedy case might be thought to indicate that foundationalist and coherentist accounts of the justification of memory belief share a common flaw: they are both (at least as typically construed) synchronic rather than diachronic theories.
Yet, containing the seeds of what I suspect should have been several novels, The Book of Memory is beset by structural flaws.
In fact many critics of memory traces argue that representative realism is fundamentally flawed even if it does not posit awareness of representations themselves.
Memory, all kinds of memory, is exploding.
The obliteration of memory.
