Identity: Lost And Regained A Bakhtinian Reading Of The Remains Of The Day

Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-born novelist, is one of the foremost British writers of his generation and the winner of Booker Prize. The Remains of the Day is the most important novel of Kazuo Ishiguro. Stevens, hero in The Remains of the Day, sacrifices all of himself in the pursuit of dignity for becoming a great butler like his father, with his entire existence founded on professionalism. His blind attachment to Lord Darlington and self-suppression result in loss of identity and betrayal of morality and humanity. It is only in his remains of the day that Stevens has a chance to reflect his duty and identity in the past of his life. The novel ends with a promising picture that aging Stevens will make use of the remains of the day and live in authenticity. The customary approaches to the study of The Remains of the Day have been greatly influenced by the theories such as post-colonialism and cultural studies. Some critics have also interpreted Ishiguro's narrative techniques, attributing the novelist's techniques to an"authentic"Japanese identity.The present thesis is completed on the basis of the predecessors'study on The Remains of the Day and is going to explore the identity theme in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day based on close reading of the text with Bakhtinian theories such as parodic stylization, carnivalism and chronotope. In the developing of the thesis, the author will successively focus on the loss Stevens's identity by analyzing Stevens's parodic stylization of his father, the unstability of identity manifested by the carnivalized mask of his language, and the promising new identity at the end of his chronotopic travelling. As there are very limited studies on Kazuo Ishiguro domestically, this thesis intends to introduce this writer and is hoped to be of some help in researches in this field.