The Memory Narration In Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View Of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro, a famous Japanese-born British writer, wins Booker Prize in 1989. He shares the name of "three giants of immigrant literature in British" with Naipaul and Rushdie. A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro’s first work published in 1982 and it wins him the 1983 Winfred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a retrospective novel. Ishiguro tells about the protagonist and the narrator’s selective unreliable memory to reflect the protagonist’s identity crisis. To some extent, the narration strategies of memory in the novel are the approaches to deal with identity crisis. The protagonist’s identity crisis is gradually relieved in her narration. Ishiguro also rebuilds his cultural identity and cures spiritual trauma through memory narration. Why Ishiguro uses the theme of memory and memory narration strategies as well as the therapeutic function of memory are the focuses in the thesis.Part one is an introduction. It introduces Kazuo Ishiguro’s life and writing career, literature review of the novel and discusses the theory basis in the thesis. Chapter one discusses the theme of memory in the novel, which mainly includes what the protagonist remembers about her past life in Japan in 1950s and the atomic bomb in Nagasaki. The protagonist tries to use her memory to reconstruct her past to relieve her identity crisis as an immigrant and find a rational reason for leaving Japan. Chapter two analyzes the memory narration strategies. By the application of frame narration and embedded narration, the protagonist’s memory of multi-dimensional time and fluid space is presented. By the employment of James Phelan’s unreliable narration, the protagonist’s hazy memory is presented. The author tries to portray the protagonist’s struggle to make sense of her past. Chapter three discusses the therapeutic function of memory narration. By presenting the therapeutic effect of memory on the protagonist, Kazuo Ishiguro expresses the novel helps him rebuild an imaginary homeland. Meanwhile, he reconstructs his identity as an international writer absorbing both Japanese culture and British Culture.Through memory narration, the protagonist comes to terms with her past and reconstructs her identity. Kazuo Ishiguro rebuilds an imaginary homeland, a "third-space" where Japanese culture and British Culture coexist, for his displaced soul to call back his memory of Japan. And he reconstructs his cultural identity as an international writer. Through the novel, the author also wants to tell the readers that we should face up to our past and history; only in this way can we get real relief.