On The Consciousness Of Anxiety In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

The20th century Japanese-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro has won the British Highest Literary Award "Booker Prize for Fiction" by his third novel The Remains of the Day. Besides, the rest of his novels have also won him several international awards. He has so far published six novels, of which the content and style vary very much. Therefore, the studies on his novels vary. This thesis is intended to comb his six novels on the basis of anxiety theory both from psychology and philosophy and analyze the characters’ consciousness of anxiety and how Kazuo Ishiguro managed endowing each main character with this consciousness of anxiety and further discuss why Kazuo Ishiguro developed this thinking. It will be better for readers to understand Kazuo Ishiguro’s works and his starting point by analyzing the writing style and the consciousness of anxiety from the former two perspectives than merely analyzing that in a literary way.The introduction mainly deals with the influences of the consciousness of anxiety on Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing and gives a brief presentation of the studies on Kazuo Ishiguro’s works at home and abroad. The first chapter analyzes the characters’ consciousness of anxiety through nostalgia, which is used in all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works. Firstly, we can tell the narrators are not satisfied with their present life by analyzing their unreliable narration. Secondly, we can tell that the narrators’ anxiety about what they have done in the past. The second chapter analyzes the characters’ consciousness of anxiety through psychology. On the one hand, the characters never ceased pursuing their identity. On the other hand, they continuously denied their identity. The third chapter analyzes he characters’ consciousness of anxiety through philosophy. In their life experience, their anxiety comes from fate and death, emptiness and lost of meaning and guilt and condemnation.The conclusion summarizes the whole thesis and points out the meaning of consciousness of anxiety in his works, through which we can understand Kazuo Ishiguro’s anxiety as an intercultural novelist better.