Finding The Self In Memory

Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British novelist, is one of the foremost and celebrated British writers of his generation and is regarded as "three eminent English postcolonial writers" with V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Consequently, many scholars and critics pay much attention to him and his six novels, studying the trauma, memory, nostalgia, setting, narrative gaps, exilic motif etc reflected in those novels. However, in general, those critics spend much time and energy in deep analysis on the later novels of Ishiguro,like An Artist of the Floating World(1986), The Remains of the Day(1989), When We Were Orphans(2000), thus, ignoring his former novels, especially his first one A Pale View of Hills(1982). Even though some scholars have indeed done some research on the novel, its distinct feature-the unreliable narration is still not discussed systematically. For this reason, the unreliable narration of the novel is worth to be discussed further. After a review on James Phelan’s Rhetorical Narrative Theory which offers this thesis a theoretical fundament to analyze the protagonist’s unreliable narration and her personality as well, James Phelan’s propositions of three axes (facts/events, ethics, knowledge/perception) in the course of the unreliable narration, character narration and the ethical effects of unreliability provide the solid bases for judging the unreliable narration in A Pale View of Hills. Concretely speaking, in the novel, the protagonist’s purposes of using the unreliable narration can be summarized into two aspects-on the one hand, it is a therapy to the trauma; on the other hand, it is a method to find and reconstruct self for the protagonist Etsuko. It is these two functions that provide a way to know and understand well the protagonist Etsuko’s personality construction in the course of her narrating stories. All these are the research focuses in the thesis.The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction. It introduces Kazuo Ishiguro’s life story and writing story and discusses the strategy of unreliable narration applied in A Pale View of Hills.Chapter two is mainly concerned with the literature review. Apart from a brief summarization of the overseas and domestic research status of A Pale View of Hills, it also expounds the narrative theory, specifically James Phelan’s Rhetorical Narratology, the theoretical framework based on which this thesis develops.Chapter three is going to discuss concretely the unreliable narration’s first function as a method to find and reconstruct self for the narrator and protagonist Etsuko.Chapter four is going to discuss the unreliable narration’s another function as a therapy to the trauma. Actually, in A Pale View of Hills, it is the trauma that leads Etsuko to be an unreliable narrator. Etsuko experiences the bereavement trauma of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide and falls into grief and guilt. Consequently, Etsuko has to find a narratee, her little daughter Niki, to narrate and speak out the bereavement trauma she experiences at present and the inner trauma of past memories.Chapter five is the conclusion which summarizes the significance of the unreliable narration employed in A Pale View of Hills. Taking advantage of unreliable narrative strategy in the first-person point of view, the narrator Etsuko finally finds and reconstructs herself and cures her bereavement trauma by means of recollecting and narrating others’ stories.