Henry James's Memento

This essay is part of a larger project that considers James's cinematic imagination and its resonances across modern and postmodern film. While it may seem odd to compare Henry James's story, "The Beast in the Jungle," with Christopher Nolan's film, Memento, both works consider the relation of memory to temporality and mortality in the construction of identity. The short-term memory loss portrayed in Memento is analogous to Marcher's "forgetting" of May as the embodiment of fate until it is too late, where she can only be recalled in retrospect, at the foot of her grave.