Inventing The Imaginary Homeland

Memory and imagination combined, reality and fantasy interweaved, the present andpast mixed, have altogether played a significant role in shaping the imaginativegeographies of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels. When We Were Orphans, one of Kazuo Ishiguro’ssuccessful novels in the21st century, is a spectacular emotion epic about the lost and found.In this novel, Kazuo Ishiguro portrays orphans who are preoccupied with trawling for cluesin their consciousness to explain and define who they are.A profound sense of melancholy, rootlessness and homelessness is more often thannot implied in his protagonists’ attempts to retrieve their past and reinvent imaginary“homeland”, which in Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro reveals in the prevailing heavy-loadedorphanhood of characters. Based on close reading of the text and by referring to thebiographical background of the author and the condition of contemporary reality, thisthesis attempts to explore the theme of orphanhood in the novel. It argues that theprotagonist, Christopher Banks, who is bereft of parents at an early age of nine, is not onlyactually orphaned. Moreover, indifferent, self-delusive, and isolated from the society, he isdeformed by the effort to social conformity and is thus socially orphaned. A pseudodetective of British ancestry who is lingering between childhood memories of enclosedShanghai Settlement and displaced life in London, Banks is insistently preoccupied withquesting for identity between the imaginary “homeland” and disagreeable reality. He isculturally orphaned. This thesis draws the conclusion that after the journey of seekingremedy to the orphanhood, Orphan Banks ultimately outgrows the “childhood bubble” andgets rid of the strong sense of “mission”, and makes conciliation between culturalidentities.A nominee for the Booker Prize in2001, Orphans has been approached in manyperspectives. Previous studies on this work either cluster around one single aspect of thenovel, e.g. from the aspect of memory or detective story, or focus on the anatomy of thenovel, e.g. from the aspect of memory or detective story, or focus on the anatomy of artistictechniques herein, e.g. the unreliable narration. However, these studies tend to ignore Ishiguro’s humanistic concern about individual’s orphaned and exilic existence in thecontemporary multicultural condition, which, this thesis argues, is intentionally implied inhis perfect presentation of international writing. Therefore, a study of the orphanhood willplay an irreplaceably important role in exploring Kazuo Ishiguro’s works.This thesis aims at profoundly exploring the orphanhood in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novelOrphans, and further dealing with the implied connotations of pursuing individual culturalidentities underlying the orphanhood, thus disclosing Kazuo Ishiguro’s deep concern aboutcontemporary human predicament, and his reflections upon seeking the remedy for theplague of spiritual orphanhood.With the deepening of multicultural researches rooted in our increasingly globalizedsociety, Kazuo Ishiguro, who is devoted to writing “international novels”, will arguablyinvites more attention and academic exploration. This thesis is expected to enrich, to someextent, the interpretation of his works and shed light on decoding contemporary literature.