Identity Formation Under Ideological Interpellation

As Kazuo Ishiguro expresses,An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day are actually rewriting the same thing.Both set in the Second World War,the two novels center on how the protagonists come to terms with their re-formed identity.Before the war,Ono was a prestigious painter,but after the war,he is labeled as militarist propagandist;Stevens was a loyal servant,and he nowadays become “a pawn of a pawn of Hitler”.This thesis attempts to probe into the possible tie between identity and ideology through the lens of Althusser's theory of ideology,in order to answer three unresolved questions concerning these novels:(1)what efforts did they make exactly;(2)why these efforts were misguided;(3)how did they cope with this “misguided effort”.The thesis is composed of five chapters.The first chapter introduces the author and his works,gives a literature review,and runs through Althusser's life and his theory of ideology.The second chapter intends to work out the social and political climate in which Ono and Stevens lived,and examines the dominant ideology that imposed on them through the prevailing ISAs and RSA,so as to find out what efforts Ono and Stevens made before the war were counted as contributions.The third chapter centers on the characteristics of ideology in Althusser's definition,and explains why the characters' efforts were misguided from two aspects,namely their subservient position and their inability to see their real relation to the reality.The fourth chapter reveals that the characters' indulgence in their past leads to an identity crisis,and analyzes how they accept their re-formed identity as a result of ideological interpellation.Based upon earlier chapters,the fifth chapter concludes that the central theme of these two novels is normal people's inability to see beyond the immediate surroundings,and Kazuo Ishiguro tries to arouse our awareness of this through his writings so that we possibly can develop a kind of extraordinary insight into what's actually happening around us.