Unrealiable selves in an unreliable Worldthe multiple projections of the hero in Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled"

  1. Villar Flor, Carlos 1
  1. 1 Universidad de La Rioja
    info

    Universidad de La Rioja

    Logroño, España

    ROR https://ror.org/0553yr311

Journal:
Journal of English Studies

ISSN: 1576-6357

Year of publication: 2000

Issue Title: New Voices in Literature

Issue: 2

Pages: 159-170

Type: Article

DOI: 10.18172/JES.64 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

More publications in: Journal of English Studies

Institutional repository: lock_openOpen access Editor

Abstract

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.

Bibliographic References

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