Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/41241
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

(Another post-apocalyptic novel question! I'm just full of them.)

My MC, Eris, has the power to manipulate life force. As a child, she accidentally killed her family and other survivors who investigated the commotion she caused while killing them, and has semi-suppressed the memory, causing the pain and trauma of the events to manifest in a recurring third-person nightmare, where she watches herself kill her family (but doesn't fully know that she's looking at her younger self).

Now she's a young woman, and has been found by a group of survivors and taken in. She feels out of place and is constantly afraid of being discovered as a killer, even if she herself doesn't quite know what she's done. Away from the others, unseen by anyone, and in a moment of rage, she projects her powers and fells a tree, killing it just by touching it. She's horrified and has only an inkling of the ramifications of her actions, and barely, if at all, makes a connection between the bizarre thing she just did and her nightmares of the girl who kills her family. I've previously talked about Eris having difficulty with acknowledging bad things she's done [here](https://writing.stackexchange.com/questions/40405/effectively-conveying-an-unreliable-narrator).

I'm maybe a quarter of the way through the story, and I think that the reader can easily stitch together context clues and figure out that the girl in Eris' dreams is her, and Eris is a killer and possesses superhuman abilities. To me, the writer, it's obvious, and when I share my piece with peers and teachers, they know what's going on and can easily put the pieces of the puzzle together.

But since it's so easy for the readers to get the background of Eris' character and figure out who she is and what she's done, would it be just as easy for Eris to do the same? Is it unrealistic for her to be unable to connect the dots and remember her actions? Will it bore the reader that Eris is missing something big?

Original score: 8