Doomsday

“Our city was outside of history now, beyond surveillance (144).” The post-apocalyptic NYC is after the period of recorded events and what is happening will only exist in people’s memory. The memory of the surviving New Yorkers becomes the true landscape of the post-blast New York City.

It’s interested that the widespread use of Albertine suggests that people are trying to escape their presence in their memories. They are willing to risk experiencing unpleasant memories to get what they were after, whether it’s Kevin trying to recapture moments with a childhood crush or Cortez enduring a traumatic experience to find Addict Number One.

The value of memory is explicit in this narrative. Lee says,“Nobody wants to have anything to do with a forgetter (186).” Those with perfect recall are the most respected. Cortez wants to disguise the origins of the drug and those who know or trying to discover it are seen as valuable and targeted: Addict Number 1, Kevin Lee, and the Brooklyn College professors. People are disappeared by being murdered in memories, but the characters are not time traveling but traveling in their own mind and the collective unconscious of the city.

Chuck Klosterman says, “Life is rarely about what happens but it’s about what you thought happened? Which has more validity in the story? The real events or the memory of events? It seems with the disappearing of people that the memories are more real than the actual presence. The novella reflects on the imperfection of memory that society relies so heavily upon.