Afterword

Abstract

The chapters in this book have presented a series of cases studies, in Irish history and in American history, having to do with the processes of remembering, narrating, commemorating, and, indeed, forgetting, the past—by exploring the relationships between history and literature, between memory and writing/fiction, between forgetting and falsification. If, as I suggested in the opening chapter, all memory and all history are versions of narrative, of interpretation, of writing fiction, of desire—and if, indeed, there is a need both to remember and to forget, then how can we decide what we should remember and what we should forget?