A Defense of Forgetting

    When I was a callow youth, I gained the reputation of being the forgetful guy. Unfortunately, my substandard memory was not conducive to my academic success in middle school, as my inability to remember homework often knocked my grade down a letter. In Memento Mori, the main character has anterograde amnesia, and in the real world, this condition is often caused by the destruction of the part of the brain that forms new memories. This explains why the main character can "live" in his past, but he's also the "ten minute man" who needs to go down his "lists" to navigate life. In Death of a Salesman, Willy is overburdened by his past. He refuses to discuss events in his life that still haunt him, and his functioning is often impaired by intrusive memories that he cannot distinguish from reality.

A real stock image depicting the childhood consequences of my

bad memory

What I found interesting about Willy's cognitive decline is that although he suppresses memories, such as Biff's discovery of his affair, he doesn't seem to have any real gaps in his memory that are observable by the audience. When Willy mislabels objects such as the car he is driving and his refrigerator, I would argue that he isn't forgetting information, because he seems to remember what they are after he is reminded - Willy is simply temporally confused. An argument could be made that Willy is dragged down by his memories, and his misery is caused by his constant reexamining of what went "wrong" with his children. 

Real image of my parents looking at my GPA.

I wouldn't want to be the protagonist of Memento Mori, but he certainly has the opposite problem. Arguably, having to relearn his mission every 10 minutes is an impediment to its successful execution, but the 10 minute man is comparatively much less impacted by his wife's death than Willy by his past, allowing him to more singlemindedly focus on revenge instead of some false notion of cowardice masquerading as forgiveness (that's the character's opinion and not my own). 

I believe that there is a reason why our memory takes years to fully develop and is notoriously unreliable. Perhaps we need to forget certain things about ourselves in order to function.