How Can We Reconstruct Stories Based on Memories?

Memories in literary texts reveal past events which complete the itinerary of a character throughout the book. Whether they are exposed from the point of view of that character or from the perspective of the other characters joining the action, the memories bring novelties about the distant or the recent past to the actual action This explorative study intends to identify memories, with an ulterior aim of temporally ordering narrative sequences for reconstructing the story of each character. Starting from the premise that memories contain temporal information, the goal is to see if this information can be used to restructure a discourse so that the entire action gets to be chronologically ordered according to the order of the events’ deployment. The described model is tested on a novel of Tash Aw (Map of the Invisible World), with possible applications to non-literary texts such as newspaper articles, social media posts, recipes, political texts.