The main character, Leonard Shelby, in the movie Memento suffered from memory loss after a major head injury when his wife was raped and almost killed. He could not remember anything that happened after the injury. Leonard relied solely on his notes and pictures for his memory and daily life. He only trusted his own handwriting. Susan Engel provides theories of memory in her essay "Then and Now: Creating a Self Through the Past" that confirms how Leonard has been able to remember things he has done or people he has met. Leonard Shelby has created a false identity by not remembering certain things he has done after his head injury and by choosing to write down certain information that does not give him enough knowledge to know the whole truth.
             Leonard is not the same person he used to be before the incident happened with his wife. He believed that his wife had died that night and a man named "John G." had killed her. After this happened, he turned his life around to get revenge for his wife and hunted down John G. "We all use the past to justify who we are" (193). In his case, Leonard uses his wife's death to justify who he is but that is not who he was. His life after his injury was dedicated to find and kill his wife's "murderer."
             Leonard burned the picture of Jimmy Grantz, Natalie's drug dealing boyfriend, whom he killed in the abandoned house. Since he did not put a note saying that the car he is driving isn't actually his, he believes that he has the money to drive that jaguar and wear the expensive clothes he has on. But in reality, he wouldn't have had the money to buy such things and created a false memory and reasoning behind it saying the money came from his wife's life insurance after her death. Engel states that people use their memory to "create a persona that may turn out to be far different from whom they used to be&quo
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