A Study On Trauma And Morality In Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist Of The Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro,a Japanese-British writer,is one of the most celebrated contemporary authors in the English-speaking world.As a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature,he is one of the three best immigrant writers in British literature;the other two are Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul.Still,he is devoted to becoming an“international writer,” and his works are rich in general humanistic concern and social criticism.An Artist of the Floating World,Ishiguro’s second novel,was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1986.The background of this novel is set in post-war Japan;Ishiguro details the decline and rebuilding of the nation and the emotional trajectory of the traumatized people in order to find the subtle relationship between trauma and moral degradation.Ishiguro not only criticizes traditional social rules and human-made disasters,which cause trauma but also contemplates the profound reason for this massive social change.On the progression of rebuilding,he warns that history should not be forgotten and emphasizes that artists and the public should bear their responsibility to avoid repeating the vicious circle of history.This thesis focuses on trauma and morality in An Artist of the Floating World,and the main content is divided into three parts.The first part explores the sources of trauma from two aspects: patriarchal trauma and war trauma.The burning of paintings stands for the disconnection between father and child,teacher and student,which symbolizes the disintegration of the traditional patriarchal system;Japan’s surrender and the havoc caused by World War II ushers in the Japanese people’s traumatic experience.The second part discusses trauma and moral deviation from the individual and collective perspectives.The protagonist,Ono,takes an evasive attitude towards the past and reality,relying upon the unreliable memory and the fragmentation of truth;due to the loss of moral standards in modern society,Japanese people without critical thinking take an acquiescent attitude toward national militarism before the war and Americanization after the war.The third part deals with responsibility which is the key to recover trauma and correct the moral deviation.The Japanese community’s responsibilities are to remember and repent the guilt-ridden history of the Nationalism;artists should be responsible for making people think,realize,and query things.This thesis’ s primary purpose and significance are to substantiate how literature and arts lead people to face the historical trauma and actively take social responsibility as a member of society.Combined with the close reading and the theory of trauma and morality,this paper discusses the sources of trauma,the moral deviation of modern people,and the recovery from trauma by shouldering the social responsibility in An Artist of the Floating World.