Is Leonard Shelby a Time Traveler?

After watching Memento and reading Lewis’ The Paradoxes of Time Travel, an odd problem arises between the situation of Guy Pearce’s character, Leonard Shelby, and the situation of one-dimensional time travel as explained by Lewis.

            Leonard Shelby, the central figure of the film, has a peculiar situation. He is a man with no short-term memory; he must constantly take pictures of what he sees and tattoos himself as reminders and directions for what he needs to do and what to remember, and his internal dialogue and reaction to these notes is voiced throughout the film. Day by day he wakes up in his hotel room with more notes and pictures and tries to figure out what he is doing with his life and what he actually is trying to accomplish within his “system” of remembering. Leonard’s life is extremely abnormal to the situation of the actual time traveler. Leonard is stuck in the normal mans world of time, experienced as flowing unidirectionally, but only has a recollection of who he is and his past, but cannot make any new memories. Although he is a conscious, sentient human being, his perception of time is not that of the normal human being: although he has consciousness, his stream of consciousness has been interrupted, so although during each day he experiences time as a normal human being, having no connection to the past corrupts the perceived experiential nature of time that everyone else experiences. Leonard’s job, as he states it, is to get vengeance for his wife’s death, and says “the world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it? My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. My wife deserves vengeance, and it doesn’t make any difference whether I know about it.” Furthmore, Leonard points out that memories are worthless, it is only facts (what he has), that are important and actually make memories irreleveant, yet states that the man who killed his wife and caused his condition “took away his ability to live.”

            Lewis, when talking about the one-dimensional time travel, first explains the world as four-dimensional, with time being of the dimensions, where change is the qualitative difference between separate temporal parts of something. A time-traveler, has different stages of time, a “external time,” and “personal time” which is the time experienced solely by the time-traveller in opposition with external time. The unique situation of Leonard, problematic to Lewis’ definition of one-dimensional time travel, is that although Leonard does experience external time the same as everyone else, his personal time is always the same. A fair argument could be made that Leonard is a time-traveler solely on the merit that his stream of connected events and constant flow of time is broken. However, within Lewis’ argument, one must experience a qualitative change between different temporal stages to be a time traveler, and that which “doesn’t have temporal parts can’t change.” Although Leonard does change physically, only as a product as his tattoos/aging, he does not fundamentally change in any sort of function or capacity: his mental and physical states are the exact same every single morning when he wakes up.

            The questions this makes me pose then are: is Leonard Shelby an actual time traveler? Yes, he is traveling through time as a conscious human being, and his personal experience of time is vastly different than that of the external time experienced by others. Furthermore, although he meets this criterion of time travel as defined by Lewis, he does not meet the standard of qualitative change between different temporal parts, as he does not remember anything he experienced before he got his condition. His personal experience of time is in direct conflict with the definition of change proposed by Lewis. If you do think he is a time traveler based solely on his condition, do you think he could or could not be defined as a time traveler based on Lewis’ theory?

            On a different note, depending on whether or not you think Leonard is a time traveler, are his states about the ethical impacts of his vengeance acceptable? Does it really matter if he gets vengeance on his wife’s killer, if he cannot remember it? Is it morally wrong for him to commit an act of violence or take a life, knowing he will not remember it?
            Finally, did the man who caused his condition actually “take away his ability to live”? It is clear he is a living, conscious human-being, but lives a different life than everyone else. He still has every single human capacity aside from short term memory: he still has a continuous identity of self and recognition of his own life and existence. Has his ability to live really been taken away? I do not think so.