Crafting Memory and <i>My Collector</i>

This creative dissertation is a partial novel entitled My Collector as well as a critical introduction that explores both the usefulness of a craft essay, and how memory is rendered in fiction through the intersection of time management and point of view. In the critical introduction, I conduct close readings of two of John Banville’s novels—The Sea and The Untouchable—and apply ideas about time and memory from essays by Maud Casey, Joan Silber, and Adam Braver. My explorations demonstrate that the role of memory in fiction is more than setting up a cause-and-effect or a simple explanation for characters’ actions in the present. Rather, memory truly exists outside of time, and memory revises a character’s present experiences just as much as it is revised by those experiences.