On The Theme Of Escape In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro is a famous contemporary British novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.Along with V.S Naipaul,Rushdie,he is known as the three great giants in British immigrant literature.Ishiguro has created eight excellent novels so far.Rich in topic,creative in style and diverse in modes,his novels have received great attention of critics since published.The Unconsoled is a transitional work after he gained Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day and this book won Cheltenham Prize in 1995.This novel tells the nightmare of the protagonist through its dreamlike language.Ryder,the world-renwned pianist,go to an unnamed central European city to give a recital to help the citizens there solve spiritual crisis and resuscitate cultural faith.Ishiguro depicts the wandering life and confused existence of postmodern people to express great humane concern in this novel.Domestic studies started late and are most focused on the traumatic narrative strategy.Oversea and domestic critics have analyzed the aspects of traumatic memory,psychoanalysis,predicament and etc.,but the escapism has not been touched so far.Combined with Escapism of Yi-Fu Tuan,this thesis takes The Unconsoled as research object and explores spiritual predicament and cultural crisis in postmodern society from three aspects of Ryder's escaping from personal identity,family responsibility and societal commitment.The first chapter points out Ryder's escaping from the true self,and analyzes the self-deception and indulgence in images imposed by others in Ryder's personalities in detail,which reflects the anxiety that Ryder bears on his identity as an exiled musician.The second chapter talks about Ryder's escape from family responsibility.On the one hand,as a son,Ryder is unwilling to face the fact of being abandoned by his parents.On the other hand,as a father,Ryder cannot play a good father role in family life due to the traumatic experience left by his parents.The third chapter believes Ryder's escaping from the commitment of solving mysterious crisis looming in this city.However,although Ryder does not perform on Thursday Night,the aim of his arrival in this city is to get people out of the unspeakable spiritual crisis prevailing in this city through his musical performance.He is always making progress while struggling and during the process of addicting to solving all sorts of trivial demands from the citizens he tries to find solutions to solve his problems.All these escape can be attributed to the following aspects:for one thing,escaping is a way in which Ryder can pursue and construct his exiled identity;for another,he can reexamine the past self on a more objective perspective through letting others to experience his past pain.Considering the ethnic cultural identity,this thesis could get a glimpse of the spiritual predicament commonly faced by mankind and their struggle in postmodern society at the turn of the century.However,such condition is inevitable as well as the escape and the sense of powerlessness prevailing in the social context.What is important is that people have made some progress in the process of escaping and pursuing:Ryder reaches reconciliation with himself,from an "escaper" to a "pursuer".And the author also reexamines this world by means of past self.The profound humanistic concern this novel shows has universal value.