Lonely People And Lost City: The Alienation In The Unconsoled

Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro is adept at describing characters' mental states in his works through spatial writing.The Unconsoled is Kazuo Ishiguro's first long work.Kazuo Ishiguro adopts Kafkaesque writing style and surrealistic techniques in this experimental work.Unlike his previous works,this novel,against the background of an unnamed Mid-European city,portrays the characters' living condition.From the perspective of space,this thesis aims to study the theme of alienation in modern city.As an English modernist novel,The Unconsoled vividly portrays the characters'mental alienation through family writing and spatial writing.Adopting the theory of space put forward by Henri Lefebvre,the renowned French socialist,this thesis aims to analyze the reasons that they fail to search for consolation and become the unconsoled people in the end.Then this thesis argues that the characters in this novel alienate themselves from families,social members and even themselves.This thesis further proposes that in the unnamed city,the so-called "crisis" that characters have been facing with is actually the alienation phenomena in three spaces:physical space,psychological space and social space.Ishiguro describes the characters' family relationship,social contact and their own minds.Besides,some typical physical spaces in this unnamed city have representational meanings to reflect and symbolize the townspeople's alienated living condition.