Leading A Wandering Life: On The Anxiety Of Spatial Disorientation In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novel When We Were Orphans

As a noted contemporary Japanese-British writer,the Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has inspired his readers with exquisite writing style and universal humanistic care.Ishiguro’s fifth novel When We Were Orphans,debuted in 2000,is set in Shanghai and England in the early twentieth century.The protagonist Christopher Banks lives in Shanghai at his early years.Yet,after the disappearance of his parents,he has to leave this city and return to his home country.Since then,he aspires to become a great detective,with the hope to realize his lifelong mission of finding his parents and justice.At present,researches delving into the novel principally focus on trauma narrative,identity issue,and post-colonial interpretation,but few has elaborated on its construction of spatial disorientation.However,in literary texts,space itself,as an existence that cannot be separated from the creator’s individual experience,is imbued with many subjective impressions and objective choices.It selectively represents the reality.The tension of the representational dimension endows more potential to the study on literary space.In recent years,space research has discerned the speedy rise of American scholar Robert T.Tally Jr.After Inheriting and innovating the achievements of predecessors,he has constructed a literary space research system.Among them,Literary Cartography,proceeding from an ontological level and focusing on the writer’s creative mechanism,enlightens this thesis.It points out: firstly,as a collection of language symbols,literary creation is equivalent to drawing a map;secondly,literary works are projections of the real world by the writer based on his/her subjectivity,which has the function of representing reality;thirdly,Literary Cartography can guide and navigate anxious individuals in such a difficult-to-represent social ensemble.The above arguments point to the spatial implication in Ishiguro’s work,and has methodological value for observing the utility of different urban landscapes in his narrative process.For that reason,this thesis starts from the arguments theorized by Tally to examine the protagonist’s anxiety of spatial disorientation.The prime city images,London and Shanghai,witness the deficiency of Banks’ childhood memory and British root.The nominal hometown has been an estranged terrain;while,the homeland in his heart drifts away.Ishiguro foregrounds the protagonist’s identity as “the other” and onlooker by mapping alienated and isolated cities through conversion of spatial images.The truth leaving behind emerges with the continuous advancement of narrative.Faced with the grand narrative of history,individual force is terribly insignificant,so the sense of mission Banks has always been proud of goes to be disillusioned.Tally believes that Literary Cartography could only achieve the goal of helping individual position and alleviate disoriented anxiety with clear narrative features.In this novel,the“Ishigurian” Literary Cartography is an innovative practice that fits Tally’s reference.He,as a writer,gives full play to his subjectivity on the basis of representing reality,which signifies that the character’s anxiety of spatial disorientation is aggravated through the splicing of unreliable fragmented memories and mixed urban landscapes.This sort of cartographic practice arouses readers to think and clears away the fog for those individuals who are addicted to the past and entangled at the present.