MEMORY AND NARRATIVE IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S ‘THE REMAINS OF THE DAY’
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2037-6681-2018-4-125-134Keywords:
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, political novel, psychological novel, memory, narrative, Yuri Lotman, Wolf Sсhmidt, contemporary English literature, image of a butler.Abstract
Russian literary critics usually regard Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day as a kind of travelogue telling about the phenomenon of ‘Englishness’ and English restraint. Some even mention the influence of Japanese mentality and Japanese philosophy on the image of the protagonist – Stevens, a butler. Based on the writer's own statements, the article shows that his objective was not to depict the everyday life of a typical English butler in the middle of the last century. On the contrary, Ishiguro tried to reveal two problems, vital and relevant in his view: the political and the psychological ones. The purpose of this article is to show on the material of the novel how memory and narrative intersect in the organization and comprehension of life experience, formalizing it into a verbal story of the protagonist. The category of narrative allows one to go deeper in revealing the process of semantic formation at the level of plot construction. Narrative gives a status of the event to the contents; moreover, there are two events: the event which is narrated and the event of the story itself. It is shown that one of the characteristic features of the art of narratology in Ishiguro’s works is the plot event, the movement of the character across the border of the semantic field. The basis of the plot is a clash of misconception of a man and the universe with the true conception. The life and fate of Stevens, his understanding of the dignity of a person turned out to be imaginary and false, and the character can be related to Heidegger’s Das Man, as he chooses unreal existence, mindlessly adapting to the established order and samples.References
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