Shuttling Between History And Fictionality

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the world-renowned Three British Literary Immigrants.Although with few works,all can be said masterpieces and praised by the world,which help him collect almost every important literary award.Committed to International Writing,he changes the writing style of the first two works full of strong Japanese sentimental color,and sets the era background of The Remains of the Day in Britain.The exquisite brushwork and the idiomatic English diction push Ishiguro to a higher literary achievement.In recent years,the research on his works at home and abroad has become increasingly rich.The text analysis mainly focuses on narratological techniques and cultural studies with Post-colonial theory,Space theory and Trauma theory prevailingly applied.Based on the concept of Historiographic Metafiction in line with the trend of postmodernism,put forward by Linda Hutcheon,a famous Canadian literary theorist,and specifically combined with two narrative techniques: one is Embedded Narration and the other is Autobiographical Narration,this paper analyzes and discusses the subjectivity and authenticity of history in The Remains of the Day as Historiographic Metafiction.At first,chapter Three mainly analyzes the fragmentation of time and space in the novel.The author’s choice of the background setting of the novel is not unintentional:the decline of the protagonist’s butler career coincides with the decline of the British Empire.And based on these,how the grand history integrated with the personal history is put forward.And then,chapter Four discusses the unreliability of the narrator’s narration of public history and personal history,and dispels his inner melancholy by giving a talk with the readers.The historical space constructed by the protagonist in his recollection is constantly deconstructed in the narration,and at the same time,the rigid thought trapped in his own historical view is also deconstructed.This paper points out that the historical factors of Historiographic Metafiction not only refer to the macro history in a broad sense,but also include the personal view of history.It can even be said that each person is his own Historiographic Metafiction,which combines the historical subjectivity,that is,the question of “by whose standard”pointed out by Hutcheon,and the historical authenticity,that is,the view that “history is constructed by human beings” also put forward by her.It calls on people to get out of personal historical dilemma and deconstruct private rigid thought.