The History In Individual's Memory

Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese-born novelist, is one of the foremost British writers of his generation and the winner of Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the literary field awarded annually to the best full-length novel written in English and authored by a writer from the Commonwealth. His works often explore themes of history and judging by his creative technique, he seems to have been somewhat influenced by New Historicism. This paper explores some of his main novels to reveal some influences of New Historicism on his works.The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter One introduces Ishiguro and the critics' comments on him, and points out that Ishiguro shows great concern for the politics and history of the 20th century because of his complex cultural identity. It also provides the New Historicism, the theoretical framework based on which the thesis develops. The New Historicist theory emphasizes the discontinuity and ruptures of history and gives birth to a new historical narrative point of view. New Historicism makes writing and text interpretation a contemporary political interpreting process. As a new "history poetics", New Historicism resurrects a historical dimension that is no longer linearly continuous but fragmental as manifested in the process of searching for historical allegories and cultural symbols. History is no longer a vectorial extension of time but fragments of a nature that is infinitely intermittent, coexistent, polarized and renaming. Those arguments seem to have imposed some influence on Ishiguro's sense of history. From the theme, style and technique of his fiction, we can easily find the traces of New Historicism, as if Ishiguro uses a new history viewpoint to create his novel. The next three chapters respectively support this point from three aspects. Chapter Two focuses on the individual and discontinuous history as represented in Ishiguro's novels. In the beginning it shows the great difference between New Historicism's individual history and the old fashioned group history. And then it gives the detailed examination of individual history represented in his fiction. And this individual history is reflected by disconnected memory, which breaks the continuity of the story as well as history. Chapter Three is another manifestation: there are different versions of history in Ishiguro's fiction, which is causedby several factors: the diffusion of hegemony controls people's sense of value. The Eurocentrism and Japanese militarism are the obvious hegemony, which influence the justice of narrators' voices and are deconstructed by Ishiguro. The next factor is that a socio-economic system that depends on "servants" determines that a segment of the population be denied its sense of "self—the narrator with a servant identity distorts the truth of history. Other reasons are individual special psyche and experiences, deliberate lies told by people and narrators' potential self-interests; all of these influence narrators' voices. But when all these influencing elements are deconstructed, other history versions emerge. Chapter Four is the third manifestation of New Historicism: searching for historical allegories and cultural symbols from historical fragments. The discontinuous and fragmental memory or diaries of Ishiguro's protagonists contain some main historical allegories and cultural symbols. Chapter Five is a conclusion in which I suggest that, though many critics deny that the Ishiguro's creation follows a certain theory, and, even Ishiguro himself refuses to acknowledge he is influenced by any writer or any theory, Ishiguro's works show obvious trace of New Historicism, and his sense of history is so different from the traditional historical view.