Protagonists’ Self-deception In A Pale View Of Hills And An Artist Of The Floating World

The protagonists’ self-deception in Kazuo Ishiguro’s first two novels, A PaleView of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, has been noted by many critics.However, more attention is paid to the study of narrative reliability of theself-deceptive protagonists’, leaving the portrayal of the psychological process ofdeceiving themselves underexplored.Self-deception is a conventional phenomenon and has attracted the attentionfrom the areas of analytic philosophy, existential philosophy, psychoanalysis and soforth. Herbert Fingarette, after a study of self-deception discussed in all the areasmentioned above, provides his own viewpoint in this issue which is more applicablefor a literary analysis of this phenomenon. Based on Fingarette’s discussion, the thesisaims to provide a detailed analysis of the protagonists’ self-deception in the twonovels, focusing on how the protagonists’ self-deception is portrayed through theirown narration.The analysis of the protagonists’ self-deception in the two novels will beconducted from three aspects: non-narrator characters, geographical setting andprotagonists’ discourse. By examining the three elements in the two novels, the thesisuncovers Ishiguro’s narrative creativity in his depicting psychological process and theartistic and thematic importance of self-deception to A Pale View of Hills and AnArtist of the Floating World. Ishiguro’s concern of self-deception also concurs withhis self-declaration of being an international writer.