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Since he can't experience the passage of time, his wife's death is always fresh to him; and so he is passionately determined to find the remaining intruder and kill him. He reminds himself of what he's doing through a series of notes, a pocketful of Polaroid snapshots with helpful information written on them and (for really important stuff) tattoos. We see that he's developed a number of clues to the killer's identity, each of these burned onto his body. The killer's name is John or James and his last name begins with a "G." He's a drug dealer; Leonard even has the killer's license-plate number. As the movie lurches backward, we see how and where he gleans each piece of the puzzle. .
How is the film's fabula presented in the syuzhet?.
The film begins with the shocking opening credit sequence, in which Leonard kills a corrupt cop named Teddy. At the same time this is the only scene that literally runs backward: In it, we see a Polaroid photo undeveloped, a bullet fly back up the barrel of a gun and Teddy came back to life briefly "after" the sound of the shot. From this point the film than moves backward form in roughly five-minute increments, to let us see how Leonard tracked the guy down, ending with what is, chronologically, the story's beginning. This scene, which is in color, is immediately followed by a black-and-white bit in which we see Leonard, in an anonymous motel room, explaining a little about his circumstances in voice-over. The next extended scene, back to color, finds Leonard meeting Teddy at his motel and then traveling to an abandoned building, whereupon we see Leonard shoot Teddy again.
The movie then proceeds, alternating black-and-white and color sequences. The main narrative of the story is the backward, color one. We stumble back in increments, and meet "new" characters - Teddy; Natalie; her boyfriend Jimmy; and a drug dealer named Dodd. Moreover, each scene steppes back to put the previous one a bit better in context and providing a lot of shocks, jokes and horrors along the way.
