The Memory Police

“‘It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island. Things go on disappearing, one by one.’”

This passage is the first explanation of the disappearances on the island. Before the main timeline in the novel, the child version of the narrator hears this from her mother, who has the ability to remember everything. The passage also establishes the heart motif as conveying the connection between lost memories and loss of emotional intelligence.

“I realized that everything I knew about them had disappeared from inside me: my memories of them, my feelings about them, the very meaning of the word ‘bird’—everything.”

Another scene from the narrator’s youth contains the first description of a disappearance that occurs in the novel—the disappearance of birds, which holds special significance because her father was an ornithologist. We learn that the disappeared thing can still exist on the island, but the concept—represented by the word—of the thing is taken away. The linguistic representation of the forgotten thing is connected with the islanders’ emotional and logical comprehension of it.

“‘The island is run by men who are determined to see things disappear. From their point of view, anything that fails to vanish when they say it should is inconceivable. So, they force it to disappear with their own hands.’”

Here, R is talking with the narrator about the “hand”-wielded power of the Memory Police: physical “force” as a method to enforce mental erasures. The police-state rulers are “men”; no women are ever seen in Memory Police uniforms, and this reinforces the idea of physicality as a method for subduing the citizens. The theme of island isolation also develops here.