Aporia In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

As one of the indispensable leading figures of contemporary British literature, Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s works have triggered off huge attention among both critics and ordinary readers. Ever since his debut work A Pale View of Hills(1982), Ishiguro has altogether published six novels:Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005), all of which have won international acclaim. His latest work Nocturnes:Five Stories of Music and Nightfall(2009) is also widely applauded in critical circle.Ishiguro’s writings are characterized by protagonists’concerns over their past and future from self-narration. The Unconsoled, to which this thesis is devoted, tells the nightmare of the protagonist through its dreamlike language. The narrator Ryder, a world-renowned pianist, went to an unnamed Central European city to give a recital, hoping to help the people there find their cultural identity and solve their crisis. As it turned out, instead of helping others, Ryder himself was trapped in this nightmarish world of loss woven by texts and failed to find consolation. Up until now, critics have tackled the novel from various perspectives, such as dream-like quality, nomadic confusion, psychoanalytic reading and postmodernist time and space distortion. An important theme of Ishiguro’s writings, aporia, however, seems to be scarcely mentioned by critics. Based on a close reading of the text and an extensive scrutiny of The Unconsoled, this thesis intends, with Derrida’s aporia in mind, to explore the aporia revealed in this novel from three escalated levels:individual aporia, family aporia and community aporia.Starting with the definition and etymology of the world "aporia", this thesis first introduces different philosophical interpretations concerning this concept, ranging from that of Plato, Aristotle, Derrida to contemporary scholars before clarifying later the specific understanding of aporia revealed in The Unconsoled. The individual aporia revealed in The Unconsoled is then examined in detail with Ryder, Hoffman and Brodsky as their representatives. Ryder is suffering from aporia of loss, which expresses itself in the form of his sense of loss, both physically and emotionally. Hoffman’s aporia is the aporia of personality, which stems from his self-inferiority and self-destructive personality. And Brodsky is tortured by the aporia of obsession, which manifests itself in his morbid attachment to his physical wound and his child-substitute, namely, his dog. Based on individual aporia, this thesis continues to analyze the aporia faced by the three clusters of family in the novel. The aporia that is tearing the Ryder-Sophie-Boris triangle apart derives from the miscommunication between Ryder and Sophie and the estrangement between Ryder and Boris. The Hoffman-Christine-Stephan triangle is haunted by the unequal relation among family members, including the imbalanced relation between Hoffman and Christine as well as the disharmonious parent-son relation between Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman and Stephan. And for the Brodsky-Collins-Bruno triangle, Miss Collins’s unhealthy competition with Brodsky’s obsession, namely, his wound and her own doubts about future and change become the apple of discord. Having analyzed the family aporia, this thesis further explores the collective aporia that is hovering above the city from the following three aspects:people’s uncertainty towards the precise nature of the crisis, their incapacity to solve the crisis and their self-deception while dealing with it. By finally answering the question of "who the unconsoled are", this thesis summarizes the theme of the novel and elevates the aporia discussed in the novel to a brand new level of modern people’s existence in contemporary society.