Who Tells Your Story? How We Remember Hamilton, and Ourselves

Who lives, who dies, who tells the stories in your family? Memories are often socially constructed. But is the narrator in your family or set of friends changing the way you remember your past?

Storytelling and Hamilton

In Hamilton the musical, the narrator changes in the final song. And that change in the narrator determines the way in which we remember Alexander Hamilton.

I had to wait to see Hamilton until the musical was available for streaming. I had heard wonderful things about it, and really enjoyed it. But as a memory researcher, I was struck by one particular point: the narrator of the story.

In presenting the story, Lin-Manuel Miranda used Aaron Burr as his primary narrator. An interesting choice, since, as the character of Burr notes, he’s “the damn fool that shot him.” There’s good reason to suspect Burr and Hamilton weren’t the closest of friends, at least not in the end. Is that who you would want to tell your life story? And yet, through most of the musical, Burr is the person telling the story. Until the end. Until the final song.

In the middle of the final song, Eliza, Hamilton’s wife, becomes the narrator. Switching narrators is a powerful storytelling device, allowing an audience to have a different perspective on events. In this case, Miranda changed the narrator to reflect something about Hamilton’s story. As the musical notes, Eliza does tell Hamilton’s story. She works for the rest of her very long life to tell Hamilton’s story after he was killed by Burr in a duel. Many of the things we know about Hamilton reflect his own writing, his work narrating his own life. But some is the work of his wife. She became his posthumous narrator.

The influence of the narrator

A narrator determines the story, choosing events and perspectives to include—and just as importantly, choosing what to leave out. History is supposedly written by the winners. But history is really written by those who write. They decide how to tell the story.

The narrator is important for our personal memories as well. Who tells the stories in your family, or in your circle of friends? That narrator plays a critical role in how we reconstruct our memories and our shared past. They select what aspects to include, and they determine what we forget. They provide the perspective. To some extent, they give each of us our dramatic roles.

Remembering is a collaborative process in groups, whether families, friends, or work associates. We work to tell a story together. Once a group collaboratively remembers something, that recollection will influence each person’s own memories. My students and I have investigated this. When people remember together, each one contributes unique pieces to the story. We didn’t see the same event originally; we focused on different aspects and we remember different details. But together, we can remember more than any of us could alone.

And later, when each person remembers? They will include information from others, because the information that others provided will become part of how they remember. Importantly, they won’t be able to track whose memory it was originally; they will claim someone else's memories as their own, "stealing" memories from friends and family (Hyman et al., 2014; Jalbert et al., 2021). We may even be confused as to who actually experienced an event, and borrow someone else’s entire memory (Brown et al., 2015).

But we don’t simply steal memories from other people. When we listen to someone else tell a story, we learn what to include and what to leave out. When we tell stories, we always leave some details out. Bill Hirst and his colleagues have found that when someone leaves something out of a story, other people who listened will often leave out the same details later when they tell the story (Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). So we also learn what to forget by listening to how other people tell stories.

In many groups, certain people have become the dominant storytellers, the leaders of remembering. The person may vary for different memory tasks. In families, one person may be more responsible for some information and someone else for other details: For example, someone remembers how to get places while another person remembers names (Harris et al., 2014). But when it comes to major events, often a family will have a lead storyteller, a dominant narrator (Cuc et al., 2006, 2007). And, like in Hamilton, that person’s story will become the story. When other people remember the experience, they will include the details the dominant narrator included, and they will forget the details that the lead narrator left out.

Remembering our past is not something we do by ourselves. We remember with our family and friends. And what our family and friends remember will become what we remember of the past. Hopefully, we will all have an Eliza Hamilton, someone who constructs a version of the past in which we are the heroes of the revolution.