A Narratological-stylistic Study Of The Artists’ Dilemmas In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes:Five Stories Of Music And Nightfall

Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.His first short story collection Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall,published in 2009,was based on his own experiences.It tells five short stories,describing the artists’ encounters with loss,wandering and failure,and in doing so,depicting the dilemmas of outsiders or marginalized people and strangers in modern society.This short story collection has not yet been fully researched,and existing studies have mainly analyzed its “musical” writing from an interdisciplinary perspective,while no scholar has studied the book from the Narratological-Stylistic perspective.Shen Dan argues that a narratological study or a stylistic study of the novel alone would tend to form a one-sided impression of the novel’s expressive or formal level,and that a combination of narratological and stylistic approaches should be emphasized in interpreting the novel.Therefore,this thesis intends to carry out a Narratological-Stylistic study and uses Shen Dan’s theory of narrative point of view and Leech and Short’s modes of speech presentation as the theoretical basis to explore the dilemmas of the artists in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.To begin with,this thesis explores the artists’ dilemmas in the materialized art world and society from three aspects: identity,marriage and the disillusionment of dreams.By describing a group of artists,Kazuo Ishiguro shows how modern people are getting lost when facing selfhood,family problems and life dreams in a materialistic modern society.In addition,the author adopts Shen Dan’s theory of narrative point of view to analyze the narrative point of view of the short story collection and its presentation of the themes.The analysis shows that,in order to better express the themes of the work,Kazuo Ishiguro adopts a combination of the internal point of view and the first-person external point of view in this short story collection,which creates suspense,greatly enhances the dramatic tension of the work and sustains the readers’ interest,while at the same time provides a more comprehensive and detailed characterization,profoundly showing the dilemmas of the artists in a materialized artistic world.Furthermore,the author analyzes the character discourse and its presentation of the themes,using the modes of speech presentation proposed by Leech and Short.Different modes of speech presentation can adjust the narrative distance,reveal the characteristics of the characters,explore their inner world,and play an important role in revealing the themes of the story.With the application of the theories of Shen Dan and Leech and Short,by analyzing and comparing the narrative point of view and the modes of speech presentation in this short story collection,the author examines the artists’ dilemmas revealed,in order to gain an insight into Kazuo Ishiguro’s exquisite art of writing and to appreciate the realistic concern that Kazuo Ishiguro gives to modern people through his works.