A Study Of Traumatic Narrative In Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View Of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro is a famous contemporary Japanese-British writer.In1989,he won the Booker Prize,the highest literature prize in Britain.For his outstanding literary achievements,Kazuo Ishiguro,together with Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul,is grouped as “Three Giants of British Immigrant Writings”.A Pale View of Hills is his debut work,which won the prestigious Winifred Holtby Prize awarded by the Royal Society Literature in 1982.Though A Pale View of Hills is one of his early works,characters' inner emotions and traumatic experiences in the novel are presented by his exquisite narrative techniques and reserved and subtle language.It has great literary significance both in content and form.A Pale View of Hills is told in the form of memory by the first-person narrator Etsuko,who recounts her postwar life in Nagasaki.Behind the unreliable narration lie her unspeakable traumatic experiences such as her loss of daughter,her war trauma,and her confusion in self-identity.Based on a close reading of A Pale View of Hills,this thesis intends to employ theories of trauma and narratology to give a detailed analysis of the traumatic experience,trauma narration,and the healing of trauma in the novel.The introduction gives a brief overview of the author Kazuo Ishiguro and the researches on this novel at home and abroad.Itbriefly introduces the theories of trauma and traumatic narratives.It also points out the feasibility of the study from the perspective of traumatic narrative.Chapter One deeply explores the traumatized subject's unutterable traumatic experiences.Through narrating her life experience in Nagasaki in Japan,the traumatized subject suffers greatly from the death of family members,her miserable war experience and her confusion in her troubled maternal identity.The painful memory makes the traumatized subject unable to face her past life or to speak out her traumatic experiences.Chapter Two analyzes the trauma narration strategies in the novel.Since trauma has the unspeakable characteristics,the novel applies unique literary narrative strategies.The reserved voice covers up the traumatized subject's strong sense of guilt towards the loss of her daughter;repetitive narration of the death motif displays the traumatized subject's unconscious flashbacks to the traumatic scenes;double characterization reflects the traumatized subject's sufferings from traumatic dissociation.These literary narrative strategies present the painful psychological state of the traumatized subject,who tries to heal the trauma through the process of narration.Chapter Three discusses the traumatized subject's healing of trauma.In fragmented memories,the traumatized subject eventually faces the trauma,reflects on herself,mourns her daughter,and reconciles with the loss;she tries to step out from the shadow of the war,and finally regains the confidence towardlife.Through the reconstruction of memory,the traumatized subject eventually reconstructs her self-identity and gets the healing of trauma to some extent.The conclusion gives a summary to the traumatic narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills.Ishiguro dexterously presents the trauma experience,trauma narration and the healing of trauma by unique literary narrative strategies in order to speak out the unspeakable trauma.The novel vividly reflects the painful psychological sufferings of those people who were deeply traumatized by the Second World War and the migration experiences.Ishiguro is concerned about the survivors of the Second World War,expressing his accusation of the war and his humanistic care for those misery-stricken people.