The Disconsolate Remain Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro is considered one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction writers in the English-speaking world as well as a Nobel Prize-winning English novelist.With highly controlled and intoned style,he has created many homeless characters in the first person narrative.The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled are thought to be two novels distinguished from each other both in content and style.The former,teeming with nostalgia for the Great British Empire,labels Ishiguro as a historical writer.While the latter,set in an unknown European town,redefines Ishiguro as an international writer.As an oft-cited thematic concern in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels,the state of being homeless is also recurrent in the two novels.Few critics associate the two novels with the writer's cultural homelessness,which is a pity for the scholarship of Ishiguro's novels.This thesis tries to proffer an understanding of the protagonists Stevens' s and Ryder's existence from the perspective of Existentialist ideas of the Look,the Other and Self-Estrangement.It is due to their bad faith on their life that they invariably go into a life of sorrow and regret only to find that there is no way back.The characters' experience of identity crisis and loss of sense of belonging has something to do with the writer Ishiguro's heartfelt cultural misplacement as an immigrant in a different society.Chapter One examines Stevens' s and Ryder's obsession with their professions at face value.Excusing their distance from the emotional area with their professional pursuit,they become objectified under the look of other people.Chapter Two delves into those professionals' innermost fear for emotions and how the emotional traumas from their early years come to shape their present being.Their emotional not belonging fits well with Ishiguro's feeling of displacement in the immigration wave.Chapter Three concentrates on the psychological mechanism that Ishiguro's characters adopt to counter their problematic life.Namely,they whimsically devise their past by sifting through their memories for their own purposes.They fabricate a different tale for themselves with fantasy to dull the irretrievable painful loss and embrace false hopes to rebuild their confidence in life.The characters' recount of their own life interestingly echoes Ishiguro's writing.Rewriting the past,foolishly hoping for a misjudged future and losing control over the present,Ishiguro's characters become soulless vagabonds in their journey.The deliberate avoidance for the painful and ignominious past and the fabrication of fantasy as the substitute for the intolerable reality are typical of Stevens and Ryder.Ishiguro's life philosophy is well epitomized by Stevens and Ryder.In the novels,he conveys the anxiety and contrition felt in the crash between the desire for success and the lack of time,as well as the ultimate coping skill of self-recounting and writing which enables them to forge ahead and find their niche in homeless state.