This paper aims at exploring collective and personal remembering, as well as the notion of forgetting as a kind of “‘rebeginning’ or finding the future by forgetting the past” (Galloway 3) in Kate Atkinson Costa prize-winning "Life after Life" (2013). In Atkinson’s novel Ursula Todd is born on February 11 1910, dies and is born again and again to undo the traumatic events that caused her previous death(s). The narrator’s retelling of Ursula’s life takes the reader through the two wars, and to different incarnations of Ursula’s life, which finally set things right for her and for her beloved ones. Following Paul Ricoeur’s "Memory, History, Forgetting" (2004) and Marc Augé’s "Oblivion" (2004), where they treat forgetting as being a positive figure, or “the reserve of forgetting” in Ricoeur’s terms, I will discuss the interlocked processes of remembering and forgetting, not only applied to individuals (like Ursula in "Life after Life"), but also to the community. Communal memory is particularly mobilised in the act of telling otherwise: “[t]hrough narrating one’s identity otherwise, a community can work through its past, have an acceptable understanding of itself, and to justice to others” (Leichter 124). Therefore, this paper will also look into the ways in which Atkinson’s novel engages with the concept of collective memory that, operating within an intersubjective model, underlines networks of individual and communal relations.
