The novel derives its name from the title of Bernard’s poem, which, as several have pointed out, we are never allowed to read.
But I also found “An Imagined Life” to be an interesting title of Roman’s book. Why did Chang choose these titles, do you think?
“For each of us, he understood, is born into our own time and eventually the things we held as the center of the world, dearly, unforgivingly, must fade.”
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Perhaps Roman's life was an imagined life in a way. He lived life at a surface level in so many ways, perhaps his life as a whole was some sort of shadow of real life.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the title of the novel, maybe that has to do with what poetry gives us -- after memories fade and everyone and everything we know is gone, the poetry itself holds the essence of life so that nothing is really lost. I don't know what it means as the title of Bernard's poem, but that's what I think it may mean as the title of the novel.
I really can't make sense of the titles. The "All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost" title seems almost like some perplexing aphorism from a Far East religion, where the goal is to lose individual self-awareness (ego) in favor of some universal consciousness, but I don't know what to make of that, really, in the context of our story.
ReplyDelete"An Imagined Life" might be a reference to how Roman, like many ambitious young businessmen, imagined the successful life he wanted to achieve and then studiously set out to accomplish it, goal by goal. Hard to say. He presumably gave the title to his own collection, and we don't know what the collection is about.
I think the author wants the titles to have a dual meaning -- the meaning that the characters would give to their works (which we may not find out, since she doesn't show us the works), and the meaning that she is attaching to them for us. (In other words, since we may not know the former, the latter may be the only intended meaning we actually see.)
ReplyDeleteIn the case of "An Imagined Life," I can see three meanings -- the one I mentioned above, that his life was lived shallowly (from Chang to us), the one Roman meant for the collection (which we don't know, since we don't know what the collection is about), and the one kc mentions (he set out to accomplish the life he imagined), which may be from Roman to himself, or from the author to us, or both.
Of course, these are just guesses -- Chang may have meant all or none of these.