Unrealiable selves in an unreliable Worldthe multiple projections of the hero in Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled"
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Universidad de La Rioja
info
ISSN: 1576-6357
Año de publicación: 2000
Título del ejemplar: New Voices in Literature
Número: 2
Páginas: 159-170
Tipo: Artículo
beta Ver similares en nube de resultadosOtras publicaciones en: Journal of English Studies
Resumen
The Unconsoled (1995), Ishiguro's fourth novel, was received with some perplexity by critics who formerly praised the author's controlled "Jamesian" realism. However dissimilar this "Kafkaesque" novel may seem in comparison with the previous three, it can be regarded as a further step in the development of one of Ishiguro's major fictional interests: the way an unreliable first-person narrator introduces characters who might be understood as extensions or projections of himself. While Ishiguro's first three novels could be said to deploy unreliable narrators who try to revisit their past and overlook their mistakes by using self-deceiving rhetoric, a sort of oneiric unreliability constitutes the general framework of The Unconsoled. This article comments on the implications of such a fictional technique and analyses those characters that may work as projections of the narrator's persona, embodying his anxieties and traumas with special emphasis on those stemming from lack of communication and parental neglect.
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