| A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro, employs an unreliable narrator to recount the past. The unique narrative style offers it the artistic charm, and meanwhile becomes the carrier of the aesthetic significance. So the thesis aims to focus on the unreliable narration from the perspective of the narrative distance, which could help to find the fragility of the memory.In the novel, Etsuko’s narrative was filled with a normal, emotionally restrained language, understatements and a peculiar silence concerning past events. All these are because Etsuko treated her memory as a way of covering the psychological trauma. In order to prove that memory could be an unreliable thing, the thesis firstly analyzes the narrative distance between the narrator and the implied author. Etsuko’s narrative distance to the implied author appears to be the explicit denials at first, which explained Etsuko’s psychological condition at the beginning of the memory directly reduced the reliability of her memory; the episodic form and unreliable contents of her memory also widened the distance between them. As a result, Etsuko’s memory turned out to be subjective and elliptical by the enlarging narrative distance. Secondly, given the emotional aspect, the traumatic feeling and the function of her memory reflected the fragility of her memory. The study on the narrative distance between the narrator and the reader proved that the past were so painful that the narrator was reluctant to touch them, besides, her memory could do nothing but be a way for the survival to live on. In a word, the analysis of Etsuko’s unreliable narration from the perspective of the narrative distance not only testifies but also enhance the novel’s thematic significance.From the micro perspective, people are supposed to regain the sense on the relation between the individual and the history via the perspective of the unreliable narrator, trace the soul trails of human beings and appreciate the meaning of forgetting. |
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