“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (post 4): Why does the author highlight an incident that the protagonist had forgotten, but which did happen?

The main plot—in which protagonist, Lily Mae Watson, an elevator inspector, is being harassed and threatened—is interrupted to describe an incident when she was six-years-old, was living with her parents, and went at night to get a glass of water.

The incident ends when she finds her father in the kitchen, he takes her on his lap, reads to her from a paper on elevator technology, and urges her to pay attention in school so she can learn to read such things herself. This makes sense in regard to how her life has turned out. But the beginning of the description of the incident is peculiar:

“Lila Mae has forgotten this incident. But no matter. It still happened. It happened like this…That night toward the end of her sixth summer was the night of the annual visitation…She couldn’t sleep for the wind’s tiresome argument with house…it was to Lila Mae that it spoke, recommending a glass of water for her parched throat…this pit itself against her mother’s quite firm instructions that she be in bed by nightfall. And stay there…She could count summers and that meant she was older, or so her persuasions whispered. Old enough, her dry throat urged, to hazard discovery while on a late-night adventure for a glass of water.” (1, pp. 116-117).

Comment

Would Lily Mae be expected to forget an incident at age six when her father took her on his lap and encouraged her to pursue what became the center of her life? Wouldn’t this be a favorite story she liked to tell? (Unless there was abuse by her father that has not been revealed.)

I am hesitant to write off the other things as mere literary flourishes, because personified metaphors of communication may be a camouflaged way of referring to communication from alternate personalities.

But my main comment is to wonder why the author interrupts the narrative with an incident that he introduces by emphasizing the fact that the protagonist had forgotten it, but it did happen. It raises the question of whether the character or author had a history of multiple personality memory gaps.

1. Colson Whitehead. The Intuitionist. New York, Anchor Books, 2000.