摘要：In Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,the first John Ames is the memory-individual whose personal memory serves as the living memory to combat the collective historical amnesia of Iowa’s antislavery *** all his efforts,memory is framed by the *** has forgotten its abolitionist root and anti-racial discrimination *** individual effort to resist collective historical amnesia *** the first Ames’s failure,Robinson presents the politics of memory,particularly the struggle between individual memory and collective historical *** historical amnesia of abolitionism over Gilead is Robinson’s criticism of the present societal betrayal of the pursuit of racial equality as epitomized in the historical antislavery ***’s memory writing in Gilead is also her literary endeavor to remember the forgotten history and to reflect upon the racial issue pervading present American society.