Narrative Progression In The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro,one of the most important novelists in the contemporary world,won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.Prize motivation is that “who,in novels of great emotional force,has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.In his fourth novel,The Unconsoled,the protagonist Ryder devotes himself to his career in order to heal his childhood trauma.However,his career success only gives him the illusory sense of connection with the world.In fact,he cannot heal the trauma by his career success,and he is even not as successful as he thinks.This thesis,adopting James Phelan’s rhetorical narratology,tries to analyzes the plot dynamics,the narratorial dynamics and the readerly dynamics in order to explore how the author presents the great impact of childhood trauma on individual existence through his narrative strategy and rhetorical devices.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One analyzes the plot dynamics which develop through the pattern of “instabilitycomplication-resolution”.An instability is an unstable situation within the story:it may be between characters;between a character and his or her world;or wi thin a single character.The instabilities in the novel are composed of the estra ngement relationships among characters,the protagonist’s inability to integrate i nto the city,and the inner ambivalence within each main character,which grad ually reveal the trauma dilemma of characters and promote the narrative progre ssion of the novel.Chapter Two explores the narratorial dynamics stimulated by tensions.An tension is the unequal knowledge among among the author,the narrator and the reader.In the novel,the narrator adopts the nonlinear narrative time,the limited-omniscient first-person narrator,and the use of humor and irony in order to eschew his trauma.These narrative techniques demonstrate his psychological defense mechanism against the trauma,and also create the discrepancy of knowledge between the narrator and the reader,thus forming the first tension.However,the implied author’s voice hides behind the narrator’s voice,which undermines the latter and reveals both the narrator’s avoidance of his trauma and his traumatic experiences.The unequal knowledge between the implied author and the narrator creates another tension.The narratorial dynamics stimulated by the double tensions present the double communication consisting of the narrator and the reader and the implied author and the reader.Chapter Three explores the narrative judgments in the novel.First,the ambiguity of the protagonist’s real life constructs “the textual recalcitrance”.The textual recalcitrance attracts the reader to interpret the text and also makes the reader find it difficult to interpret.This kind of two-facedness of interpretation leads to the reader’s ever-changing ethical judgments and further to the multiple interpretive judgments about the protagonist during the reading,which unveils the diversity of the author’s literary conception.Second,Ishiguro guides the reader to make narrative judgments about his international writing.He immigrated from Japan to The UK in his childhood,resulting in his homeless role who is neither Japanese nor British.In the novel,he constructs a low-context cultural scene to show the trauma caused by the lack of cultural connection between the individual subject and the collective subject in the context of globalization.Ishiguro achieves the multilevel communication between the author,the text and the reader through his narrative strategies in The Unconsoled,and manifests his narrative intention of understanding traumatized individuals and exploring human nature through fiction.In the novel,the protagonist’s family trauma in childhood is used as a metaphor to reveal the emptiness of the individual existence in the contemporary world of great change.In the meanwhile,Kazuo Ishiguro warns the reader by exposing the character’s traumatic experiences that for the purpose of finding our connection with the world and the meaning of our existence,we can either establish intimate relationships with others,or transcend ourselves in the pursuit of eternal art,rather than eschew trauma.