Ordinary People: The Reader’s Changing Relationship to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Narrators

Abstract

This study explores the role of the narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, concentrating on the middle three of his seven novels (The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, and When We Were Orphans). Critics note the fragmented nature of memory drifting in and out of the narrators’ consciousness, and focus on individual narrators as they unreliably remember their past. The narrators create identity and meaning with their stories; critics have examined the errors and self-delusions in the individual stories. My work seeks a pattern spanning the various narrators, and sees a development in Ishiguro’s novels that changes how the reader experiences the narrator’s story. My research uses critical studies, Ishiguro’s interviews, and close reading of Ishiguro’s text. By variously appealing to the reader’s own consciousness (their sense of identity or cultural clichés, for example) to fill in gaps and background he has purposely only sketched, Ishiguro increasingly shifts the center of consciousness in his novels from the narrator to the reader. The reader is challenged to write the story along with the narrator; the story increasingly involves the reader’s own memories and identity; the reader becomes a participant in the creation of meaning. The effect across Ishiguro’s novels is to suggest a reservoir of memory fragments common to us all, and processes of story-telling shared by us all. From this perspective, his work appears to be a life-long study of how we create meaning, set in the murky realm of memory. The Nobel Prize committee’s 2017 award to Ishiguro was to a writer "who . . . has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" (Svenska Akademien). This thesis considers Ishiguro’s work as supremely connected with the world of inner consciousness, and as illustrating our commonality in creating meaning across the abyss.