Through the representation of history via one’s memory, often there are acts of deliberate selection and emphasis to help support an idea. History is a contested version of memory, and therefore memory on its own will be more bias and its representation will often have deliberate acts of selection and emphasis, used through the book True History of the Kelly Gang by “Peter Carey”. It’s representation of memory is to validate the idea that Kelly is an oppressed individual by the British policemen, and that it is justified that he became a bushranger. In Forest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis” explores this concept different. He focuses on the accidental selection and emphasis of the representation of history, through the memory of the protagonist “Forest Gump” due to his low IQ to justify how much a person can achieve while having a lower level of intelligence than those around them.
History is contested memories, and memories are small parts of an individual’s subjective life. In Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang and Forest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis, connections between history and memory create compelling and unexpected insights to characters, events and situations. Within the representation of both texts, there are acts of selection and emphasis. Some of these instances are deliberate, whilst others are accidental.
In “True History of the Kelly Gang”, Carey structures his the book as 13 parcels, written from a first-person perspective in past tense as the character “Ned Kelly” to his “dear daughter”, to convey sympathy from the audience by demythologising the ‘Kelly figure’ and humanising him to support the idea that the Irish were oppressed by the British in Australia. Therefore through Kelly’s ‘memoirs’ the cruelty of the British police and a repetitive parasitic