Distorted World

Kazuo Ishiguro is a prestigious Japanese-born British writer who is well known toBritish and world readers. He is uniquely adept at digging deeply into the characters’psychology, rendering with masterful hands the inner struggles and tragedies of hischaracters. Because Ishiguro is Japanese-born British who is influenced by Japaneseculture, his novels are not only popular in Britain, but also find great applause from theAsian readers.However, Ishiguro’s hybrid background also leads to a reductive tendency in thereading of his works. Most critics would prefer to read his works from the angle ofpostcolonialism and cultural studies. There is still some room left for exploring in theaspect of Ishiguro’s depiction of the inner drama of his characters. After reading hisnovels, in fact, it’s not very hard for meticulous readers to find most characters in hisfiction experience psychological distortion such as repression and displacement.Therefore, the thesis picks out three of Ishiguro’s representative works The Remains ofthe Day, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go for further investigation.Through close reading, it approaches the issue of distortion in these novels from theperspectives of the memory, personality and sense of honor, with the aim to reveal theorigins of the distorted world of the main characters, the mechanism involved and thetragedies resulting from it.Besides the introduction, the thesis is divided into three chapters as well as aconclusion. Chapter one is devoted to analyze the phenomena and reasons of thedistorted memory among the characters in the three novels. Chapter two discusses howchildhood trauma and the crisis of identity inflict pains upon the characters and lead totheir distortion in personality. Chapter three analyzes the characters’ distortion in theirsense of honor and unravels the fact that the crisis of dignity is the main reason for theirdistortion.In the conclusion, the thesis points out that Ishiguro creates a distorted world in his fiction in which his characters, including Stevens in The Remains of the Day, ChristopherBanks When We Were Orphans and the Donors in Never Let Me Go, are traumatized andsuffering from the identity crisis.