A Narratological Interpretation Of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day

Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the world’s most important contemporary writers, together with Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, are called "Three Giants of British Immigrant Writers". The narrative features of Ishiguro’s work are almost unique in the accepted canon of English literature and technique. This is largely due to the mixed chronology of the plot, to the extreme ambiguity of the narration, and to the flexible employment of different modes of speech that accompany the narration. Therefore, this thesis attaches more importance on fiction’s language form than its content itself, that is, the discourse analysis on his Booker Prize winner, The Remains of the Day.Based on the theory of narratology, this thesis intends to analyze Ishiguro’s unique narrative features in characterizing the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day. It is clear that Ishiguro always has been fascinated by the instability of narrative, by the unreliability of narrators. And he employs narrative features such as the first-person unreliable narrator, the shifting internal focalization and different modes of speech presentations etc. to capture Stevens’s complicated and contradictory inner world. Furthermore, it reveals the dilemma of all human beings in the world, which shows Ishiguro’s great concern about the living condition of human being and his contribution to the modern "international novel".