The Imagined Homeland

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. He has published six novels (A Pale View of Hills, Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go), most of which are concerned with individuals scanning their past for clues to their sense of identity, loss or abandonment in a historical background. Nostalgia is the main drive in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels and his works often explore the maze of human memories in a historical context. For him, nostalgia is not only for the poetic tradition in the western and eastern literary worlds, but also for an imagined homeland—a third space of communication. This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro's famous work, The Remains of the Day, to reveal the nostalgic theme in his work and further points out that by using nostalgia as a strategy, Kazuo Ishiguro not only manifests his great command of English and Japanese cultures, but also constructs a third space of communication.The whole thesis is composed of six chapters.Chapter One introduces Ishiguro and critics' comments on him and his work, The Remains of the Day, and explores the etymological development of the term "nostalgia", while pointing out that nostalgia has already been a millennium ailment in the late 20^th century with its' omnipresent existence from the souvenir vended in traveling destinations, the commercial movies in Hollywood to the nostalgic atmosphere produced by highly advanced technology, which definitely influenced every one living in the modern life. Combing the complex cultural identity of Kazuo Ishiguro with the causation of the nostalgic trend, the thesis argues that by using nostalgia as a strategy, Kazuo Ishiguro not only shows his great command of western and eastern literary traditions, but also construct an imagined homeland—a third space of communication.Chapter Two focuses on the exploration of Kazuo Ishiguro's rewriting of the Grail motif in English literature. Due to the double influences from the two totally different cultures—the eastern culture stand by the Japanese literary tradition and the western culture by English literary tradition, Kazuo Ishiguro's works have manifested complex cultural heritages from the two worlds and even some cultural clashes in his work. In The Remains of the Day, he uses a traditional English motif to represent a Japanese theme on loyalty. In the motif of the quest for the Holy Grail, the hero and the god are sung of in a heroic spirit. However, Ishiguro subverts the motif by turning the quest into a butler's pursuit of what proved to be ridiculed and blind at the end of the story. And the man he blindly followed turned out to be a dupe of Nazis.Chapter Three is going to discuss Ishiguro's rewriting of the butler character in The Remains of the Day. In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro apparently borrows a character from English literature but creates a Japanese samurai instead. The butler Stevens is a successful rewriting of P.G.Wodehouse's famous Jeeves. Kazuo Ishiguro turns the bright and independent English butler into a blind servant with the spirit of Japanese bushido which emphasizes absolute loyalty.Chapter Four is going to explore Ishiguro's narrative patterns in his work. The unreliable narrator and unreliable narration in The Remains of the Day is one of his appeals to readers. He immerses Stevens between the present and the past world, presents not just what he has done, but what he has recalled and thought of, so that readers can never be sure of whether the events he has retold are located in reality or just in his "mental world". Through convincingly reconstructing the past, Ishiguro explores the way how the historical events influence individuals and make people come to terms with the present or the future.Chapter Five is going to carry out a study on images in Ishiguro work. The images in his novel are created to strike the reader with a new experience. Most importantly, because of his complex culture identity, the images in The Remains of the Day reflect the writer's post-colonial state in this or that way.Chapter Six is a conclusion to summarize the theme of nostalgia in Ishiguro's work. The fiction of Ishiguro, which is related to the conventions and context of postcolonial writing, reflects the author's own drifting state of cultural identity, and represents a new trend in the postwar immigrant fiction. By creating works with western and eastern literary features, Ishiguro is trying to construct a third space of communication.