On The Modernity Of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Homeland Consciousness

As one of the most celebrated, contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro often tells his characters’ current life by displaying their nostalgic memories, and looks for ideal redemption between dream and reality. Ishiguro’s thirst for redemption is rooted in his cultural identity of modern immigrant; this special hybrid identity puts him into predicament, which results in loss of the sense of home. In order to ease the worries of this loss, Ishiguro does not only jump out of a fixed role in the flow of modernity according to one’s own experience, and reconstructs the adaptive homeland consciousness in the perspective of cosmopolitanism. Therefore, in his novels, he consciously writes the unique identification of immigrant, and provides strategies for constructing stable homeland consciousness.Homeland consciousness is a spirit of complex system, which the person takes the initiative to distinguish, strengthen, and then condense what based on significant geographical, social and psychological boundaries. It includes native home, culture home and spiritual home. The homeland consciousness for former modernity usually treats hometown as the center of life, therefore, hometown carries almost three layers of habitat sentiment. However, with the enlargement of the human communication and multicultural integration, the experience of modern becomes more mobility and hybridity. As a consequence, their homeland consciousness may no longer be called "seek roots", but reach a compromise with their "journey", so that they can catch a home feeling in one kind of disguise or another. Thus, for immigrant, they often construct homeland consciousness in a state of not ideal but relatively harmonious under the fragmented modernity context."When We Were Orphans" is Ishiguro’s major work which explores the identity and homeland consciousness of immigration. Ishiguro takes immigration as a performance object in this novel. The leading character Banks grew up in Shanghai, and couldn’t blend in the current British society. He tried to learn the motherland country customs, but failed to find real emotion and imagination. Native home was a barren field, cultural home got messy, spiritual home was difficult to sustain, Bank’s homeland consciousness was a state of lost. As a result, Banks wanted to feel again the original happiness of the teenager time by returning to Shanghai concession, and he could complete identification of the purity of British culture. However, after he knew the truth of his missing parents, he broke all the fantasy, and has accepted his dual-identity with a healthy heterozygote image so that looking for the home belonging to himself.The predicament of identity and home which Banks had is the common living circumstances of modern migration, if native home is a memory of the wilderness, cultural identity becomes the existence parameter which person use to locate the identity. When cultural identity presents a state of no-end which is put in reflective monitoring, and then spiritual home seeks a harmonious counterpoint between subject and objective. Ishiguro tries to provide a road to construct homeland after suturing rootlessness and affirming heterozygote by using the late modern society globalization landscape and decentralized historical context. This proves that Ishiguro homeland consciousness has said goodbye to the hometown complex in former modernity, and has turned into an openness state of modernity...