"I know all too well that memory cannot be trusted, and I have surely heard this said by others. But I am constantly being shocked anew at how wildly deceptive memory can be. It beguiles us at every turn."
In these opening lines, the narrator sets both the tone and the theme of the story. Memory's deception is the major point of emphasis here; throughout the story, the narrator examines selected memories one by one in order to shed light on a particularly vivid memory that he suddenly realizes seems to contradict itself. He reaches no resolution, utterly fooled by his own memory.
"But even as I go on making one reasonable-sounding guess after another, I realize that my ‘evidence’ has no more validity than any other tricks of memory. Not a thing I have mentioned here is certain. Indeed, I can refute every item without even trying."
At this point in the story, the narrator realizes that he knows absolutely nothing for certain about this memory of him pushing a pram full of peaches with his mother down a long country road on a winter night, reflecting the theme of memory's deception and ambiguity. He goes on to prove that every one of these elements could be incorrect, leading to resignation that he will never discover the veracity of this memory.
“What emerges from this is the arcane spectacle of me as a boy, wheeling a pram that holds my infant self.”
This the last line of the story, the culmination of all the narrator's retrospective efforts. After sifting through many childhood memories, he has realized that the memory he's investigating will never reveal its true nature to him; distant memory is too deceptive and ambiguous. This final image, representing the reward the narrator receives for his work, is nonsensical and yet figuratively loaded with meaning: the image of the grown narrator seeing himself as a boy, who is in turn pushing a pram that holds himself as an infant, reveals the level of self-dependence in shaping and interpreting memory, thus making an objective interpretation from memory next to impossible.
