Why Is Memory Important In Real Life

Real Life Situation: As part of my English Literature and Language Course, I’m analyzing a book by Gabriel Marquez, named Chronicle of a death foretold. The book is based on true events, and explores a local murder. In order recount the events and causation of the murder; Marquez interviews several eyewitnesses of the murder, each of which remembers the day very differently. Ranging from disagreements about the weather to the amount of times the victim was stabbed. This seemed absurd to me, as people who had each witnessed the same sight under the same circumstances provided polar opposite accounts of what had actually happened. It led me to question whether memory as a way of knowing is limited in it’s ability to provide us with knowledge and moreover the accuracy of the …show more content…
Historians have often relied on eyewitness’s recounts of an event in order to gather more knowledge of the event itself. For example when I was visiting a Museum in Normandy France and exploring the Bao tapestries about Battle of Hastings I came to realize that our shared knowledge of the event relies greatly on the stories recounted by soldiers that fought in the battle based which these tapestries were crafted, this maybe because in the 1066 AD written culture and the invention of the printing press had not yet come about and people’s knowledge was limited largely to what they were personally able to remember. Although the knowledge provided by the tapestry is open to interpretation, the front running claims made based on the memories of the eyewitnesses that a battle had taken place and there had been casualties and destruction were later corroborated by other sources such as analysis of the fossils and ruins at the sight of the battle suggesting they were probably accurate in arguing that a battle did take place and thus possibly about it’s specific details as