Enid Stevick, the central character in You Must Remember This, is another of Oates’s intelligent, talented young scholar heroines. Enid is by turns cold and fragile; like Connie in the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Enid has two sides to her personality. There is Enid Stevick, shy, intelligent, Roman Catholic, a model student, always receiving high grades. The other side of Enid is “Angel-face,” the daring, conniving, sensual side. “Angel-face,” with the encouragement of some older girls, is a shoplifter, and, repeating “Why not?” about the affair, propels Enid into the passionate but destructive relationship with her handsome young Uncle Felix.
Felix Stevick is the most vibrant character in the novel. He is an extremely attractive former prizefighter. Felix is an outsider, troubled by his illegitimate birth and the suicide of his father. Felix exercises an instinct for self-destructive violence. This impulse to self-destructive behavior in Felix is what attracts him to Enid after her attempted suicide and leads him to continue their obsessive, incestuous affair. Felix is attractive but lonely and alienated, seeing himself an outsider except in the prizefight ring or in his lover’s arms.
Warren Stevick is the brother of Enid, the only male in a family of three sisters. He served in the Korean War and was seriously wounded. During his struggle to survive, Warren had an epiphany. Always helpful and considerate of others, he realized that his mission in the future must be to help others. In his idealistic political journey, he becomes a pacifist, then serves on an unsuccessful Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign, and finally works for Children’s Aid in a Philadelphia slum neighborhood. In his contacts with his favorite sister, Enid, he makes perceptive statements applying to the central themes of the book.
Lyle Stevick is the bookish head of the Stevick family, father to Enid, Warren, and their two sisters. Lyle has a dead-end job as the owner of a secondhand furniture store. He worries about government corruption and fears enemy bombs; his main obsession is building a backyard bomb shelter. His worries typify, although in a ludicrous fashion, the worries of many people in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.