Most memorable story you ever read?

[Kyriakos]

Although i guess some people will tend to remember all stories they read (i do that to a degree), i thought of asking if there is one which sticks more to memory.
Surely the general plot and characters are easy to remember for works which made an impression, but is there any particular piece of literature which you have voluntarily or involuntarily memorized to great detail?

I used to play a game with myself in which i was seeing in my imagination all of the scenes of a story, from beginning to end. I particularly did that with Kafka's Metamorphosis, since i have read it a lot of times. I found it helped me with my own writing, since it enabled imagination to become a bit more automatic, enabling in turn a sort of quasi- automatic writing.

I also recall Gogol's The Overcoat, probably in full detail, up until the final part which i only remember in general, probably because the mood of the story altered dramatically there.

[YesNo]

There are a lot of stories that I remember, but the one that popped into my mind when I read your post was Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find".

[a4et2n]

Hm... Poe has a tendency to stick around, particularly The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat. Same goes with Infinite Jest and once you read Burroughs, certain parts just don't go away. The Stranger's also quite memorable, especially the last line in the original French.

[cacian]

The work of Moliere.
I use to act them out with a friend.
It was amasing when I think about it! LOL

[marcolfo]

there is this story by garcia marquez about a really really old man with really really big wings.

[LunarPlexus]

A4et2N: The Tell-tale Heart is impossible to get out of your head! I too have some stand-out Poe pieces, my favourite's being

"The sickness–the nausea-
The pitiless pain-
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain-
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain." -From the poem "For Annie"

And "A Dream Within a Dream" in its entirety.

I have a really hard time putting anything at "Number One", so these are the works that really stick out to me:

Thoreau's "Walden", because it's just beautiful and satisfying to read. I'm not sure how respected a writer he was, but reading about the practicalities and the most simple kind of life just feels lovely and "grounding".

"Lighthouse Keeping" by Jeanette Winterson, because I LOVE that incredible woman's writing style. It's engaging, involved, and almost TACTILE! There are two stories mirroring each other, and they both break the reader down to nothing more than there own childhood confusions and curiosities, paired with their adult lusts and failings. She has an amazing ability to reduce you to your absolute, fundamental, raw HUMANITY, and it's unsettling in such a satisfying way.

"The Beautiful Room is Empty" By Edmund White, because it is raw, and there are absolutely no pretensions. There was no "toning down", and at the same time Mr White clearly felt no need to shock anyone. It's so bare, with privileged little insights into his own self-loathing, and he doesn't ever endeavour to interpret anyone else's feelings. It culminates in the Stonewall Uprising, and he remains pretty much apathetic to it, which seems so much more realistic for the time than any heroics. Also, the title comes from a Franz Kafka quote in a letter, which I love: “Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty."

Feel like I'm talking too much, so those are MY stand-out-works for now.

~Plex

[WICKES]

The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl

I loved this. Henry Sugar is a selfish, shallow, upper class english idiot who is spending the weekend at a country house with friends. One evening, while the others are playing cards, he wanders off into the library and finds a dusty little book about the techniques of eastern yogis. He keeps the book and takes it home with him. He practises the techniques in the hope of gaining the power to win at gambling- and it works; he is able to see through cards and focus the roulette wheel into landing on his number. At first he uses these skills for purely selfish gain: he hits the big London casinos and makes millions. But the yogic training has changed him. He is disgusted by all this money and ends up throwing a huge wad of cash out the window. It causes a commotion, a policeman appears at the door and yells at him "if you've got that much money to spare why not use it for good?...my god, you could build an orphanage". So he does. He breaks the big London casinos, then moves to the south of France etc and builds a series of luxurious orphanages all over the world with the money. After he dies a friend recalls being in a restaurant with him and him not having enough to pay the bill. Yet he is happy- much happier than he was at the beginning.

A wonderful story which moves me almost as much as Dickens' A Christmas Carol; like A Christmas Carol it is about an unpleasant man with good buried in him who undergoes a transformation from selfishness to selflessness and is much happier for it. C S Lewis wrote "the doors of hell are locked from the inside". How true that is. When you only care about yourself life is ugly and empty.

[missmeadowsweet]

There are a lot of stories that have stuck in my memory. I agree that Poe's stories tend to make a lasting impression. Also, Pride and Prejudice influences much of my thoughts and my writing. Also, Brave New World, Jane Eyre, and Frankestein. Oh, and also one of my favorite young adult historical fiction/fantasy novels called The Perilous Gard. This last is a wonderful story, containing adventure, history, old ballads, manor houses, fairies, and a good bit of wit as well.

[Emil Miller]

It is difficult to say which is the most memorable because there are so many, but one that comes immediately to mind is The Taipan by W.Somerset Maugham.

Set in Singapore when it was British colony it concerns a wealthy business man who has risen to the top in the expatriate community. One day he is passing through a cemetery reserved for white people and noticing the graves of business rivals whom he'd known, congratulates himself on having beaten them all. Then he sees two Chinese coolies digging a grave and, as he hadn't heard of anyone dying, starts to enquire among his associates but they too don't know anything. The grave starts to haunt him and he determines to leave and return to what he believes will be safety in England but just before he can leave, he is found behind his desk dead from a heart attack and is duly buried in the grave.

I could write from memory about a number of Maugham's stories because no writer, in my opinion, had such an acute insight in to human nature.

[kasie]

The Berlin Antigone by Rolf Hochhuth - don't know if it is still in print but I certainly hope so. I read it in my late teens when the period it describes (Hitler's Germany) was not so very far in the past. It seemed to me the epitome of Tragedy - it moved me to Pity and Terror, desperate pity for the plight of the heroine and horror at the existence of a regime that could not only condone but demand that such terrible retribution could be carried out. In bringing the Antigone story up to date, Hochhuth forced me to consider whether I would have been capable of such courage and I'm afraid the answer was, and still is, 'probably not'.

[Theunderground]

The canterville ghost,though i have only read it very recently.
Notes from underground and the pit and the pendulum i would class as very memorable also.