"Self" Regained-on The Unreliable Narration In The Remains Of The Day

Kazuo Ishiguro is a famous Japanese-born English novelist in20thcentury. He isregarded as one of the Three Migrant Giants in British literature, along with the othertwo——Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul. He shows special understanding onliterature and art. All his novels have different styles. The subjects of his novelsinclude the noble family in Europe, the modern China, Japan, and biotechnologyexperiment in the late1990s in England.Kazuo Ishiguro is not a productive writer and until now he has only published sixnovels, but all of them have received great concerns from readers and critics, in whichThe Remains of the Day is the most famous one. The Remains of the Day wins himBooker Prize Winner of1989and was listed on the Publishers Weekly as one of thebest sellers.The artistic features of The Remains of the Day have attracted more and moreattention from the readers and critics. Among the artistic features, the unreliablenarration is the most prominent one. There are a few studies on The Remains of theDay, but people haven’t studied the theme from the angle of unreliable narration.This thesis explores the unreliability of Stevens’s narration in The Remains of the Dayby adopting Wayne Booth and James Phelan’s theory on the unreliable to reveal therhetorical effects of such narration on the ethical positioning of the implied author, theimplied reader and the narrator himself.The body of this thesis is divided into four chapters. In the part of Introduction,there is some information about the writer, the novel, and some reviews on the studiesof this novel, including some comments from the literary critics. Chapter One mainlydeals with the theoretical basis used to analyze Steven’s unreliable narration,especially the unreliable narration theories of Wayne Booth and James Phelan.Chapter Two discusses the relationship between the narrative techniques and theunreliable narration and the detailed analysis of Stevens’s unreliable narration by applying James Phelan’s identification of six subtypes along three axes. ChapterThree is about the analysis of the effect of unreliable narration on characterizingStevens by applying the Rhetoric Act between the implied author, narrator, narrateeand the implied reader in The Remains of the Day. Chapter Four discusses Stevens’s“Self” regained after the analysis of the effect of unreliable narration. And finally, theconclusion is drawn, that the unreliable narration makes the characteristics of Stevensvivid, and makes the readers think about philosophy of life.