Rewriting Of Classics-the Study Of Parody In When We Were Orphans By Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most prestigious writers with a growinginternational renown whose works have been celebrated all over the world. His workWhen We Were Orphans (2000) tells that the famous detective Christopher goes backto Shainghai to investigate his parents’ mysterious disappearance when he was a kid.The work has been studied from various perspectives, covering identity issue, traumaand recovery, orphanhood and its cultural significance, and international themes andso on. The thesis investigates the parodic relationship with other parent works and itsnarrative strategy with the method of close reading.Parody is generally regarded as “repetition with a critical distance’, which aredouble-coded. The encoder and decoder need to work together to decipher the double-voiced parody text. The functions of parody direct both towards the parent work aswell the real world with a critical edge. And the polemic effects of parody could beridiculing, neutral or respectful. The body part of the thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter investigates his parodic relationship with detective stories and how itdefies the reader’s expectation of the genre in both characterization and plot. Thesecond chapter explores its parody of the orphan images and their “surrogate father”along with their cultural significance in a transcultural society. The third chapterdwells on the similar workaholic figures of butler Stevens and detective Banks andendeavor to be professionally best. Their common background is the World War Ⅱ,whose significant cultural implications also will be under study.Parody as a rewriting strategy, sets out to examine the parent texts with criticalawareness. By parodying the traditional detective conventions and Dickens’ works aswell as his Booker Prize Winner fiction, a more thorough approach is conductedtoward the characterization and plot organization in the novel. With the double-codedcritical distance between parodied texts and the new one, the western and easterncultures are reconciled in the mixture of conventional and revolutionary writings.