25 pages • 50 minutes read
Aimee BenderThe Rememberer
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Water and Sky
Water and sky imagery appear throughout the story, and both are images that often accompany definitions of the sublime. Both the ocean and the sky strike humans as limitless, which can represent both possibility and emptiness. Annie keeps Ben in a pan filled with saltwater, she eventually takes him back to the ocean, and Ben’s struggles with humanity lead him to contemplate the sky, which Annie finds she cannot do in the same way. Ultimately, the reoccurrence of water and sky set these two characters up against vast backgrounds that challenge their ability to think.
At the same time, Bender uses small details to make connections between the sublimity of water and sky and the unexceptional quality of everyday life. When Annie cries into Ben’s pan, she refers to the pan-water as “a sea of me” (Paragraph 2); Ben’s eyes are blue and unwavering (Paragraph 8); the sheets that Annie gets up from to go out to look at the sky are pale blue (Paragraph 10); Annie imagines that the baking pan makes its way on the ocean waves to someone who needs it (Paragraph 20). These details bring the sublime experience of loss closer to the everyday-world and illustrate how the profundity of the sublime can arise in the most mundane places.
Wishes and Dreams
Just as the imagery of the ocean and sky point toward the sublime, which often escapes language, wishes and dreams are human practices that resist rationality and logic. Instead, wishes and dreams exist within the realm of feelings rather than thoughts. Throughout the story, wishes and dreams are shown to be the human response to experiences that defy understanding or explanation.
Ben takes Annie outside in the middle of the night to look up at the stars and says that “there is no space for anything but dreaming” (Paragraph 10), which he finds comforting as he is able to fall asleep afterward. Yet, Annie feels overwhelmed by all that space and “tried to find a star that no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if [she] did” (Paragraph 10). Annie’s thought suggests the vastness of how many stars there are and how many wishes have been made on them. Readers can consider, just like Annie, what might happen if a star is wished on for the first time. Would those wishes be more likely to come true? In this way, Bender questions, but doesn’t necessarily challenge, the purpose of dreaming and wishing.
When Annie kisses Ben’s neck and makes wishes there, she seems to follow the logic that wishes are best made on places that are unique and that no one has ever wished on before. While her logic might lead her to place a great deal of faith in the wishes, she ultimately decides to only wish simply for good. As she says, “My wishes became generalized long ago, in childhood; I learned quick the consequences of wishing specific” (Paragraph 11). This thought implies the adage “be careful what you wish for,” since often we think we know what we want, but when we get it, we are often disappointed, or worse. Thus, while Annie’s logic and thinking leads her to avoid wishing on a generic star, she chooses to keep her wish vague and indefinable beyond “good.”
Finally, when Annie takes Ben to the ocean, she makes note of all the people sunbathing “laying their bodies out to the sun and wishing” (Paragraph 21). What they are wishing for, Annie doesn’t guess, but she nods at them, seeming to understand their need to hope and to wish for good things to happen to them.
Signs of Civilization
Although “The Rememberer” holds much more in common with a fairy tale than with a historical treatise, the concepts of humanity, civilization, society, and progress underlie the evolving emotions between Annie and Ben. Annie says that Ben is going through a “reverse evolution,” which plays on the typical story of human evolution as a movement of progress. Theoretically, evolution is the story of small-celled-organisms eventually becoming humans over the ages. To go through “reverse evolution” suggests that Ben is not just moving back in time, but is regressing in power and complexity. He becomes less civilized as he devolves. Yet, Bender challenges the notion that civilization should be so valuable. As Ben says, “We’re all getting too smart” (Paragraph 8). Evolution, “bigger brains,” more thought and complexity seem to come at the price of happiness as both Ben and Annie share in a sadness about the world.
Bender also includes mention of Ben’s “out-of-print special-ordered book on civilization” (Paragraph 4) and the “old biology teacher” (Paragraph 3) which point to education and literacy, both signs of civilization. However, both of these signs fail to provide Annie or Ben with happiness or relief from their anxieties. The professor’s knowledge doesn’t explain Ben’s condition, nor is it even legible. Ben never picks up his book on civilization before he transforms into an ape. While civilization suggests many benefits such as power through knowledge and the ability to communicate in language, “The Rememberer” shows how those benefits fail in the face of loss and the bizarre and unexplainable.
