It is also a story that begins with a memory, as the narrator recalls her past from her old age.<\/p>\n
It reminds me of the narrative in The Shrouded Woman, and both of them are like recollections of the past, where the story unfolds through memories rather than through a linear plot (Also, at the beginning, they both emphasize the change in their appearance!). But I think the narrator in The Lover is more like an aging woman stands in the present, repeatedly looking back at her past, interrupting it, revising it, and reconstructing it.<\/p>\n
(I like the line: “…I think you’re more beautiful now than then.
\nRather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your
\nface as it is now. Ravaged.”(pp.3)!!!)<\/p>\n
In the text, it is not like a story that is well organized in chronological order; rather, she recalls different moments of her past through fragments of memory, constantly jumping back and forth in time. In the line, \u201cThe story of my life doesn\u2019t exist. Does not exist. There\u2019s never any center to it. No path, no line\u201d (p. 20), it suggests that life is not like a novel that has a clear central line that everything follows. Instead, it is composed of scattered memories and experiences that do not necessarily form a continuous narrative. Through this fragmented structure, the narrator reconstructs her past not as a fixed story, but as a series of memories that emerge at different moments, so this story is not simply telling a story, but rather repeatedly retelling and revising things that have not been told before (It is not like saving and loading a fixed memory, but more like reconstructing the past each time it is narrated).<\/p>\n
Later on, she talks about the photograph, which does not exist. I think just because of its absence, it precisely gives the image its significance. And this implies that the meaning of the moment was not visible at the time it happened, but was constructed afterward through reflection and memory. As a result, the image becomes more than a simple record of the past: it is a reconstructed memory that gains meaning over time.<\/p>\n
Hence, I think it does not make us think this book is not simply retelling a past that has been stored somewhere like a fixed record, but is constantly returning to the past to rethink, reinterpret, and rename what happened(?). This implies that the memory is like the untaken photograph, because the moment was never fixed as a concrete record, it remains alive in memory that can be revisited and revised again and again.<\/p>\n
(btw, I DONT LIKE THE LOVE IN THIS BOOK AT ALL!!! It is insane… I thought this was going to be a warm and romantic love story, but it turned out to be completely different from what I expected. )<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is also a story that begins with a memory, as the narrator recalls her past from her old age. It reminds me of the narrative in The Shrouded Woman, and both of them are like recollections of the past, where the story unfolds through memories rather than through a linear plot (Also, at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lover","tag-memory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108051"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jsrmst202\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}