A Rhetorical Narratological Approach To Kazuo Ishiguro's Novels

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the best-known British contemporary novelists.The recent studies on Ishiguro's works abroad and at home have made a lot of achievements.The early responses lay much emphasis on Ishiguro's migrant background,and analyze the Japaneseness in his early works.Besides,a great number of reviews,essays,and symposiums have been contributed to his Booker-prize winning The Remains of the Day.Ishiguro's childhood experience of immigration and early years' engagement in social work steered his attention to human perception.Sufferings and losses due to the War developed his interest in the emotional dimensions and memory configurations of ordinary people in his writing.As a determinant factor of his life,the Second World War binds Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills(1982),An Artist of the Floating World(1986),The Remains of the Days(1989),and When We Were Orphans(2000)into a thematic whole.Although the abundant studies of The Remains of the Day take notice of its Second World War background,there are still short of a comprehensive discussion of those novels.By locating his characters in vastly diverse settings to capture images of the Second World War from varied angels,this discussion will profoundly disclose,from ordinary people's point of views and by different means,Ishiguro's first-person protagonists' existential dilemma and identity crises after their geographical,cognitive,and psychological displacements around the War.Integrating narratives with memories,the novels begin and end in memories,in which Ishiguro's protagonists accomplish the journey of spiritual redemption.The previous studies on Ishiguro's novels deal with the themes of memory,emotions,trauma,and the eternal loss of childhood mainly from the perspectives of post-colonialism,neo-historicism,genre,psychology,narrative techniques,etc.This dissertation holds that the studies from the perspectives of postcolonial,neo-historical,etc.seem to have the tendency of generalization,which possibly has much to do with the constraints of interpretation framework and lack of specific close reading.While the studies from the perspective of psychic repentance and memory concealment fail to pay attention to the implied author's endeavour to communicate with the reader through the narrators' memory and narrative,and to convey his deep concern with humanity and to provide the universal consolation,which is the very soul and ethical position of Kazuo Ishiguro's works and the type of communication that he is so eager to facilitate.Kazuo Ishiguro attaches great importance to the reader's role in the process of reading and devotes considerable attention to the reader's emotional,cognitive,psychological,intellectual,and ethical engagement.Rhetorical narratology fits neatly into such characteristic emphasis on the interaction of text,author,and reader.According to the rhetorical theory of narrative,character narration is an indirect art including two kinds of narrative communication,that is,narrator to narratee(narrator function),and implied author to authorial audience(disclosure function).This doubled communication itself is a layered ethical situation.On the basis of the recent researches abroad and at home,the present study applies James Phelan's rhetorical theory of narrative to conduct a relatively meticulous reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's four novels with the Second World War background.Taking Phelan's six major rhetorical reading principles as the analytic tool,the present study takes Phelan's four major rhetorical issues,i.e.,narrative progression,narrative judgments,narrative focalization,and narrative unreliability,as the kernel issue of Ishiguro's four novels respectively,and explores tentatively how the rhetorical double communication in character narration realized in these four major issues.The dissertation is composed of seven chapters.Chapter One confirms Kazuo Ishiguro's literary reputation and introduces four of his war memory novels.It answers two questions: Why do I particularly study four of Ishiguro's novels? Why do I apply a rhetorical narratological approach?Chapter Two outlines the rhetorical theory of narrative,describing its major principles,major issues,and the interrelationships among them for the present study.Chapter Three focuses on A Pale View of Hills,mainly studying how the double communication of character narration is achieved in narrative progression in this novel.After a brief introduction to the narrative motivation of the character narrator,this chapter analyzes “the beginning”,“the middle”,and “the ending” chronologically.This chapter holds that the double communication in A Pale View of Hills is achieved in narrative progression in the following ways: the character narrator tells her own story by telling others' story in order to fulfill her purposes of searching for lost motherhood,redeeming the soul,and consoling the trauma;the implied author's designing of textual dynamics,readerly dynamics,a self-conscious character narrator,and especially a surprising ending helps him realize his rhetorical purposes of helping the character narrator discover her value and relieve guilt and emptiness,and disclosing to the authorial audience a mind map of how people seek after consolation and confront pains by storytelling.Chapter Four investigates An Artist of the Floating World,and mainly studies how the double communication of character narration is achieved in narrative judgments in this novel.This chapter first introduces briefly the character narrator's narrative motivation,and then analyzes how the character narrator,the key characters and the authorial audience make interpretive and ethical judgments respectively on the character narrator's past career,and finally analyzes the authorial audience's aesthetic judgments.The chapter holds that the double communication in An Artist of the Floating World is achieved in narrative judgments in the following ways: in order to search for the lost glory,the character narrator makes interpretive and ethical judgments on his past career and constantly revises them,and finally accepts that he is actually an ordinary man lack of insight;the implied author guides the authorial audience to make interpretive and ethical judgments on the character narrator and on the latter's interpretive and ethical judgments,and further make aesthetic judgments on the whole textual design,drawing the authorial audience deeply engaged in the discredited people's mental journey from avoidance to confession and then to remediation.Chapter Five explores the most-discussed The Remains of the Day,primarily examining how the double communication of character narration is achieved in narrative focalization in this novel.After introducing the narrative motivation of the character narrator,this chapter analyzes the character narrator's memory and search from the perspectives of dual focalization and free direct discourse.It holds that the double communication in The Remains of the Day is realized in narrative focalization: on the one hand,for the purposes of searching for the bygone professional dignity and missing love,the character narrator projects the self-consciousness of the narrator “I” onto the character “I”,shifting between or converging the focalization as character and the focalization as narrator;on the other hand,the implied author integrates the story with the discourse by means of dual focalization and free direct forms,conveys his ethics of empathy towards the character narrator,and fully displays the extremely repressed but turbulent inner dramas.Chapter Six focalizes on When We Were Orphans and studies how the double communication of character narration is achieved in narrative unreliability in this novel.This chapter first presents a brief introduction to the character narrator's narrative motivation.The main body of the chapter analyzes successively the unreliable narration in the first half of the novel depicted in the realism,in the second half depicted in the surrealism,and in the ending depicted in the realism again.The surrealistic and metaphorical scenes deprive the authorial audience of the truth.However,due to the continued ironic distance between implied author and narrator,between narrator and reader,the double communication in When We Were Orphans can still be realized in narrative unreliability.On the one hand,the childhood traumas gives rise to the chain reactions of unreliable narration from the axis of value and ethics,to the axis of knowledge and perception,and then to the axis of characters and events,with the structure and narrating logic of the whole novel presenting unreliability.The character narrator eventually accepts his orphanhood and steps out of his childhood trauma.On the other hand,the implied author leaves the authorial audience to make the final judgments and reconstruct the truths of the past,thereby innovatively transfers narrative unreliability from facts to psychology,from epistemology to ethics,and also from mimesis to metaphor,conveying his profound empathy to his character narrator.Chapter Seven summarizes the main findings of this study,pointing out that World War II background of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels determines the urgency and obstacles of the double communication in character narration.It is the urgency and obstacles that invite the reader to get involved emotionally,cognitively,psychologically,and ethically,and further realize the dynamic communications among the rhetorical triangle of authorial agency,textual strategy,and readerly response.The boundless charm of Ishiguro's novels is exactly built on these dynamic interactions.