The nostalgia tied with madness is used to make sense of not the past, but the individual, which then creates the past as a tool for sanity, therefore it does not perceive to be gone or dead. Nostalgia works as a distortion and distraction. Andrew is using his authoritative knowledge of cognitive science as magical realism. For the majority of the book, he is stuck in his head and the logical world perceives to be a fantasy. Andrew uses science as the only method to wrap his head around his past and current reality, but it backfires because he ruminates and realizes the past cannot get back, despite how much Andrew can remember. The issue arises when Andrew notes, “It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind” (111). Doctorow is questioning the brain.
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Andrew and Eggers are aware they cannot fully remember, hence the unreliability and humor because it is amusing to think people can remember the past precisely. Eggers is aware that as a writer, he is an entertainer. He tells himself, “You have been determined, then and since, to get this down, to render this time, to take that terrible winter and write with it what you hope will be some heartbreaking thing” (119). Eggers contemplates the notion of his lost nostalgia as trickery. Additionally, Doctorow writes, “Their moral nature is in the remembered voices of the dead. It is what is left of the dead that is still them, that fragment of the voice that renders a moral nature though the rest of the person is gone” (38). Replace “dead” with “nostalgia.” The nostalgic rendering is key to the madness. A rendered nostalgia is a trickster tactic and the difference between a memoir and fictional story is no longer visible. The quotations emphasize the madness of remembering and it relates to humor and unreliability because fundamentally, that is what the trickster archetype carries forth as an outlier-- a trickster’s outer appearance is someone who acts crazy, as well as
Andrew and Eggers are aware they cannot fully remember, hence the unreliability and humor because it is amusing to think people can remember the past precisely. Eggers is aware that as a writer, he is an entertainer. He tells himself, “You have been determined, then and since, to get this down, to render this time, to take that terrible winter and write with it what you hope will be some heartbreaking thing” (119). Eggers contemplates the notion of his lost nostalgia as trickery. Additionally, Doctorow writes, “Their moral nature is in the remembered voices of the dead. It is what is left of the dead that is still them, that fragment of the voice that renders a moral nature though the rest of the person is gone” (38). Replace “dead” with “nostalgia.” The nostalgic rendering is key to the madness. A rendered nostalgia is a trickster tactic and the difference between a memoir and fictional story is no longer visible. The quotations emphasize the madness of remembering and it relates to humor and unreliability because fundamentally, that is what the trickster archetype carries forth as an outlier-- a trickster’s outer appearance is someone who acts crazy, as well as