How does memory work when something happens that shouldn't have happened? And how can one find out the truth when the living and the dead say different things - with the same conviction?

"The Germans, cowering at the other end of the road, were deploying a new weapon. Now they continued their foolishness with machine guns as if we were lighting matches by the boxful, swarms of rabid bullets crackling around us, belligerent as wasps. At last, however, a few words of sense did escape the hussar's lips:
- Sergeant Barousse has just fallen - he said in a breath.
- And then? 
- He was shot when he went in front of the bread wagon on the road to Etrapes, Colonel!
- So what? 
- He was torn to pieces by a shell!
- So what! Damn it!
- He's dead, Colonel.
- Is that all?
- That's all, Colonel.
- And the bread?"
(Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journey to the End of the Night)

He who meant the world dies and she who cannot live without him lives on without him. And the man awakens by the desire to see what comes after him - what if everything goes on as before? What if it doesn't change anything that the person who was there all along is suddenly no more? Because the night is unbearable and the waking is unbearable but the real hell is between two people who destroy each other beyond redemption and then try to remember what they did. They close their eyes in the elevator, in front of the mailbox, in the street, in the restaurant but their minds keep putting together a series of things that happened in different years, in different places so that they are left with nothing but difficulty. But how does memory work when something happens that shouldn't have happened? And how can one find out the truth when the living and the dead say different things - with the same conviction?