Recollecting Memories, Reconstructing Identities: Narrators as Storytellers in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go.
Keywords:
Kazuo Ishiguro, Benjamin, Arendt, storytelling, memory, deathAbstract
In his novels, Kazuo Ishiguro uses the narrators as storytellers, both in a Benjaminian and in an Arendtian sense. He uses this literary strategy in order to connect his characters’ construction of identity to their fragmented memory, a process which allows them to recover from their phantasmal and unresolved past. The central aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Ishiguro deploys the use of the literary strategy of the narrators’ storytelling differently in his first four novels and that it plays a more active role in When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005). In these later novels the storytelling is closer to a dynamic subject agency and is used to demonstrate the narrator’s rejection of falling into a paralyzing sense of victimization. Self-nowledge is more actively related to a process of critical understanding of the narrators’ life experiences, as in their tales they leave aside the Benjaminian apocalyptic vision of the historical experience as paralysis and enter Hanna Arendt’s domain of storytelling as action.Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles. They authorise AEDEAN to publish them in its journal Atlantis and to include them in the indexing and abstracting services, academic databases and repositories the journal participates in.
Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), for non-commercial (i.e., personal or academic) purposes only, users are free to share (i.e., copy and redistribute in any medium or format) and adapt (i.e., remix, transform and build upon) articles published in Atlantis, free of charge and without obtaining prior permission from the publisher or the author(s), as long as they give appropriate credit to the author, the journal (Atlantis) and the publisher (AEDEAN), provide the relevant URL link to the original publication and indicate if changes were made. Such attribution may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the journal endorses the user or their use of the material published therein. Users who adapt (i.e., remix, transform or build upon the material) must distribute their contributions under the same licence as the original.
Self-archiving is also permitted, so that authors are allowed to deposit the published PDF version of their articles in academic and/or institutional repositories, without fee or embargo. Authors may also post their individual articles on their personal websites, again on condition that the original link to the online edition is provided.
Authors are expected to know and heed basic ground rules that preclude simultaneous submission and/or duplicate publication. Prospective contributors to Atlantis commit themselves to the following when they submit a manuscript:
- That no concurrent consideration of the same, or almost identical, work by any other journal and/or publisher is taking place.
- That the potential contribution has not appeared previously, in any form whatsoever, in another journal, electronic format or as a chapter/section of a book.
Seeking permission for the use of copyright material is the responsibility of the author.
