Memory is a subjective faculty used by the mind to store and remember information about life experiences, including those experiences that have or have not yet happened. Memory is a tool used to accomplish the mind’s top priority to make sense of the world around it, and because of this, memory can be a mixture of past experiences, dreams, and wants for the future. It's a concept associated with the past, can, paradoxically, illuminate the future, as it does for Alex. However, Memory can also be inhibiting when wanting to forget or repress a past experience that’s obstructing the mind, as it does for Grandfather and Lista. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of "Everything is Illuminated," writes a brilliant and acclaimed semi-fictitious, magical-realism novel that follows Memory and the antithetical concept of seeking the past to go forth with the future. When Jonathan sets off on a quest in the Ukraine to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s during World War II, he hires a translator, Alex, and a guide, Alex’s grandfather, to aid him. On their journey to find Trachimbrod, Jonathan and Alex actually set out on a path to self-discovery. Alex is a young man who lives with his abusive, alcoholic father, his pseudo-blind grandfather, and his beloved younger brother, who is seemingly always getting himself hurt and is thereby nicknamed Clumsy. Alex cares very much for Little Igor, whom which he tells (and fabricates) of all the “positions in which [he] is carnal” to make him grow into a “generative man” (Foer 3). Craving to escape what he knows of his life in Ukraine, Alex dreams of moving himself and Little Igor to America where he can create a new life for himself far different from the life that his father lives and wishes him to live. Throughout the novel Alex becomes real with himself and accepts his reality, one that doesn’t include girls, money, or clubs, and finally faces his abusive fathe