Amnesia of Death: The Unsettled Endings of the Dead Who Don’t Know They’re Dead

Abstract

In this essay, I try to explicate the recent prominence of texts and films that feature protagonists whose memories have been erased, and particularly who don’t remember their own histories, and especially the paradoxical fact that they have died. These often traumatized figures—who need a designation, and whom we might call the nescient dead (“ND”)—are not zombies; they simply don’t realize that they are dead or exist in a repetitive flux between what Lacan termed the two deaths. Many of these narratives update a Modernist sense of belatedness, reflecting our anxiety that something has already ended, but we haven’t acknowledged it yet.