When the Amnesiac Rejects Their Former Self: Identity and Responsibility in Fiction
This essay contains major spoilers for Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium and The Rook. Amnesia in fiction often arrives disguised as freedom. A character wakes without a name or history, apparently released from accumulated decisions. Yet the world has not forgotten. Other people remember promises, betrayals and debts. Bodies preserve addictions, injuries and reflexes. Institutions retain records. The past has vanished only from the place where the character can experience it as their own. Planescape: Torment , Disco Elysium and Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook all begin from this asymmetry. Their protagonists no longer fully identify with the people who created their lives, but they inherit what those people set in motion. That inheritance does not take one form. Harm may create duties of acknowledgment or repair. Broken trust may require evidence of change rather than a declaration of innocence. Information left by a former self may deserve attention without acquiring the authorit...