Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World raises many questions about the relationship between memory and identity. Both narrators suffer from memory alteration. The hard-boiled narrator wants to get his “stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self” (239). The shuffling surgery causes him to have false memories and lose some brain space that held memories. The narrator in the end of the world is separated from his shadow, who holds their memories in the Shadow Grounds and later escapes through the Southern Pool with them. The shadow says, “I got most of our memories, but what am I supposed to do with them? In order to make sense, we’d have to be put back together, which is not going to happen” (247). Yet, the narrator believes that, even without his shadow, “little by little, I will recall things [...] And as I remember, I may find the key to my own creation, and to its undoing” (399). Finding memories, he argues, is the key to undoing the consciousness sealed off in the narrator’s mind.

Memories, as parts of the self, are not only destroyed by the shadows of the Town’s citizens dying at the end of the world but are also carried off by the beasts—unicorns—and stored in their bones.