Misremembering In Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist Of The Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World is narrated by a retired painter,Masuji Ono who immerses himself in the fantasy of memories,recalling his personal experiences before and after the Second World War.As one of the crucial narrative features in Ishiguro's novels,memory has aroused great interest of scholars at home and abroad.However,less attention is paid to memory's malfunctions and its inaccuracy.The memory in An Artist of the Floating World is actually memory errors between remembering and forgetting,or misremembering.Unable to face up the culpability in the past,the narrator Ono manipulates,distorts,and rewrites his memory,intentionally or unintentionally burying the past with misremembering.This paper explores the misremembering in the novel in three aspects,namely,psyche,narrative,and history.It argues that Ishiguro's novel is more a false memory writing than a memory writing.This paper is divided into three parts.Chapter one centers on the relationship between misremembering and psyche.Under the influence of both objective and subjective factors,the narrator gets stuck in misremembering.It is an ambivalence oscillating between remembering heartening past and forgetting miserable experiences.Misremembering fulfills the narrator's private motivations,helping him fight against oblivion,salvage dignity as well as unify the self.Chapter two focuses on the relationship between misremembering and narrative.Ishiguro constructs a special narrative pattern— “misremembering narrative”,by deploying time montage,autodiegetic narrator,and denarration to mimic the way people misremember.Readers are unable to make detached narrative judgments because they are prone to trust the narrator's distorted narrative and sympathize with the narrator and his action.Misremembering narrative also exposes the instability of the represented world and the indeterminacy of meaning.Chapter three concentrates on the relationship between misremembering and history.Misremembering amplifies the flexibility of historical narrative,the limited historical perspective of individuals,and their inadequate reconciliation with history,which stresses the incapability of comprehensively perceiving history.Nevertheless,misremembering provides an alternative way to get close to historical truth.Reexamining and reconstructing the history of World War II in Japan with misremembering,the novel indicates Ishiguro's “ambiguous” attitude toward such period of history: on the one hand,he represents the authenticity of history;on the other hand,he escapes from the bad side of history and refuses to reflect upon history objectively.In conclusion,An Artist of the Floating World represents the misremembering phenomenon in psychological mechanisms,revealing the complexity of human psyche.Based on misremembering,Ishiguro establishes the distinctive “misremembering narrative” which uncovers the restrictions of narrative.Besides,the novel highlights the intricate relationship between misremembering and history: misremembering both lays bare and covers up historical truth;meanwhile it reconstructs history,appealing us to confront and reflect upon history.