On The Application Of Unreliable Narration In The Remains Of The Day

The Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, along with Sir Salman Rushdie and the Nobel Prize winner, Sir V.S. Naipaul, is regarded as one of the Three Migrant Giants in British literature. His Japanese blood and his British growing-up background give him a unique taste on European and Asian culture and art as well as national traditions. His works cover from the East to the West, involving western aristocratic life, wars breaking out in the East Asia and colonization; and even cloning experiments to human beings in the modern world. Having various topics, with each attempt, Kazuo Ishiguro amazes the general audience every time.After publishing his first novel A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro got his worldwide fame immediately. While he has published only seven novels so far, all of them are well regarded, among which, The Remains of the Day is the most famous and widely spread. Due to the success of The Remains of the Day, he won the Booker prize in 1989.The Remains of the Day that stays on the top best-seller list for a long time attracts plenty of readers and critics. Among the researches of the novel text, there is so few of them about the perspective of the unreliable narration. Hence, the author of this thesis will do some researches on the application of the unreliable narration strategy by using the theories on unreliable narration coming from narratologist Wayne Booth and his pupil James Phelan. By masterly applying the unreliable narration strategy, Kazuo Ishiguro shows the typical image of a butler from an ancient aristocratic family and exposes and rethinks the British national identities and humans’ paths of self-seeking.The thesis can be divided into six parts.In the introduction, there is some information about the biography of Kazuo Ishiguro and brief introductions to his novels. The author also collects the overseas and domestic research materials about The Remains of the Day. In addition, there is the thesis statement.In Chapter One, firstly, there is a brief introduction to narratology about its decades’ development. Then there are theories from Wayne Booth, most important of which is the concept of implied author that he pioneered. Finally, it introduces the amendments and developments about Booth’s theory by James Phelan. Phelan’s most important improvement to his teacher’s theories is the theory about unreliable narration along the three axes and the six subtypes along the three axes.In Chapter Two, first, it measures the possibility about the first-person unreliable narration with combining the text of The Remains of the Day and unreliable narration theories. Second, by using the rhetoric school’s theories from the unreliable narration to analyze the text of the novel, it judges the leading character butler Stevens is an unreliable narrator from the perspective of narrating self and experiencing self.In Chapter Three, it analyzes the features of unreliable narration in the text and the personality traits of the leading character Stevens. First it points out that in The Remains of the Day, different types of unreliable narration always co-exist in a single matter; and the unreliable narration can be able to transform into reliable narration. Second, by analyzing Stevens’ narratives, it sums up Stevens’ personality traits as vanity, hypocrisy, stubbornness, parochialism, self-deception and ignorance.In Chapter Four, it introduces the significance of creating the image of Stevens. The image of Stevens reflects the features of the British traditional culture and national character. It is also a representative of those people who lose themselves in front of the material world. By carving the image of Stevens, Kazuo Ishiguro expresses his reflection to the British traditional culture and national character and shows his worry and expectation to people’s excitement and development in the modern world.The last part of the thesis is the conclusion. It points out that the unreliable narration strategy of Kazuo Ishiguro is not only the rhetoric feature but also the key that makes The Remains of the Day thought-provoking.