| Contemporary Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro was the Nobel Prize winner in 2017.Ishiguro,V.S.Naipaul and Salman Rushdie are known as the “Three Giants of British Immigrant Writers”.His fifth novel,When We Were Orphans,was well received and was nominated for the Booker Prize.The novel mainly tells the story of an Englishman Christopher Banks’ searching and constructing his identity.Domestic and foreign scholars mainly study this novel from the perspectives of trauma theory,hybridity theory,postmodernism,unreliable narration,memory theme and so on.However,these previous studies tend to ignore the issue of identity from the perspective of heterotopias,which is what this thesis discusses.Based on Foucault’s heterotopias theory,this thesis analyses the protagonist’s identity confusion and identity construction in heterogeneous spaces.In the two heterogeneous spaces of the novel--the Shanghai International Settlement and London,Banks,as an immigrant,suffered the confusion of identity.Family crisis and bicultural identity in the society made him unable to blend into any spaces.The double displacement led to the sense of homelessness and rootlessness of Banks,so he embarked on the journey to pursue his identity.As an adult,Banks returned to the Shanghai International Settlement,expecting to construct his identity by solving the case of his missing parents.In the process,Banks gradually recognized the truth of the world,get rid of the illusion about a single identity,and finally accepted the fact of being an orphan and having hybridity identity.This thesis finds that Kazuo Ishiguro concentrates on the immigrant groups’ identity confusion and identity construction in heterogeneous spaces.In the era of globalization,immigrant groups suffer from the confusion of identity and itch to seek for a sense of belonging.Kazuo Ishiguro’s ideas on the affirmation of hybridity identity provides a strategy for the identity construction of the immigrant groups.Such cultural hybridity identity is not only the result of constructing their identity,but also the start of broadening their cultural horizon and international vision. |
