phd thesis on kazuo ishiguro

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Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Making meaning : death, dignity, and dasein in kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go.

Angel Katrina Tuohy , Montclair State University

Date of Award

Document type, degree name.

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

Thesis sponsor/dissertation chair/project chair.

Jonathan Greenberg

Committee Member

Jeffrey Gonzalez

Jeffrey Miller

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , with a focus on the way the novel considers large questions concerning the “meaning” of human life and the nature of “human condition” as Ishiguro calls it in interviews discussing his novel, using language and terminology provided by phenomenologist and philosopher Martin Heidegger in his seminal work Being and Time. This thesis builds on these questions to consider the complex ways that the concept of “dignity” as shown through the experiences of clones who have socially predetermined lifespans complicates issues surrounding the inevitability of death, the uncanniness of clones and organ donation, and the reluctance to resist circumstances that cannot be changed. Ultimately, the novel provides a way of approaching a kind of bittersweet hopefulness in moving towards death, despite the crushing weight of its, and our, unalterable circumstances.

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Recommended citation.

Tuohy, Angel Katrina, "Making Meaning : Death, Dignity, and Dasein in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go" (2020). Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects . 332. https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/332

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Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Sim, Wai-chew (2002) Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Celebratory claims for the epistemic centrality of the diasporic, nomadic and non-territorial subject have been advanced in recent years. Migrancy is said to confer privileged sensibility and ocular omnipotence; it has also been proposed as a universal ontological condition. At the same time there has been immense critical investiture in the counter-hegemonic valencies of diasporic and syncretic or hybrid cultural forms, which are often parsed as inherently oppositional or subversive, all of which helps to buttress theoretical moves that downplay or dismiss paradigms of rootedness, territoriality and/or national identity in contemporary critical discourse.

This dissertation challenges the articulations above through a critical elaboration of the writings of Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. It does this by drawing attention to the operation of exilic self-fashioning in Ishiguro's fiction. But, more importantly, it shows that his writing inscribes a trajectory that is metacritical in its ambit, suggesting that critical elucidation of cosmopolitan cultural production needs to attend to the systematicity and effects of international capital if its oppositional impetus is not to be emasculated. This claim derives from the propensity in Ishiguro's fiction to refine the substance of earlier work in response to their popular reception, while simultaneously restating contestatory themes, which means that his authorial trajectory is also able to illuminate some of the commonplace misrecognitions underwriting the reception of cosmopolitan cultural production. Insofar as the increasingly normative insistence on the oppositional makeup of diasporic and syncretic cultural forms and experiences tends to misjudge the appropriate proclivities of global capital the predominance of the former in critical discourse is, therefore, deeply problematised, together with the allied propensity to devalue materialist interpretative categories. The importance of exilic themes in Ishiguro's fiction and also the trajectory proposed here reminds us, however, that migrant encounters can take many forms, and hence that scrupulous attention must be paid to the negotiated specificities of different migrant encounters.

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Psychological disorder and narrative order in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels

Duangfai, Chanapa (2018). Psychological disorder and narrative order in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

This thesis explores Kazuo Ishiguro's six novels written in first-person narrative mode: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, The Unconso/ed, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go. The focus is on how Ishiguro's narrative techniques allow him to explore the themes of psychological disorder with which his work consistently engages, which will be identified here through use of ideas drawn from Sigmund Freud and from literary studies of trauma fiction. The argument will be divided into six chapters. In each chapter, one of Ishiguro' s novels will be studied thoroughly. Distorted narrative and the technique of transference of Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills are explored in chapter I. In chapter II, the research concerns particularly how Masuji Ono, the narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, who suffers from his demand to be respected and his indecisiveness in defining the sense of respect especially as a great artist. Chapter III deals with narrative of Stevens, an English butler, in The Remains of the Day, whose problem concerning his professional achievement in its relation to the idea of id, ego and superego. Chapter IV argues that The Unconsoled engages with how the dream-like narrative technique is developed in order to reveal Ryder's psychological problem, and how Ryder uses the dream-work mechanisms, especially displacement, to deal with his problem. Chapter V explores how When We Were Orphans works as detective fiction and how this relates to Christopher Banks' psychological problem, and, finally, in chapter VI, I examine the particular psychological problem articulated by the clone narrator of Never Let Me Go.

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Home > Graduate Studies > Electronic Theses and Dissertations > 270

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The narrators and narratees of kazuo ishiguro.

Katherine E. Harrell , University of Denver Follow

Date of Award

Document type.

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Organizational unit.

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences

First Advisor

Jan Gorak, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Susan Walter, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Adam Rovner

Absolution, Confession, Narratee, Narrator

My thesis examines the narratees of three novels by Kazuo Ishiguro: An Artist of the Floating World , The Remains of the Day , and Never Let Me Go . In each novel, a first person narrator directs his or her story toward an unidentified narratee. Through their narration, the narrators reveal who they imagine their narratees to be and why they are telling their stories to these particular types of people. In relating their narratives, Ono, Stevens, and Kathy H., the respective narrators, each reveal a secret they have sought to hide from the other characters in the novel, a past action of which they are ashamed and for which they desire to confess and offer justification in the hopes of receiving absolution. Ono reveals to his narratee that he used his art to further the Imperialist movement in pre-World War II Japan and caused the arrest of one of his anti-Imperialist students. Stevens, a British butler narrating from 1956, admits to loyally serving an aristocrat who was both a Nazi sympathizer and an anti-Semite. As part of a cloning program in an alternative 1990s England, Kathy H. calmly submits to and assists a system that will eventually harvest her vital organs for use by others. Unable to find anyone to sympathize with them, understand their reasons for acting as they did, or forgive them for their mistakes, the three narrators turn to narratees they imagine to be much like themselves. Through their relationships with their narratees, these narrators grapple with guilt, responsibility, self-deception, and autonomy in their various contexts.

Publication Statement

Rights Holder

Katherine E. Harrell

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Recommended Citation

Harrell, Katherine E., "The Narrators and Narratees of Kazuo Ishiguro" (2014). Electronic Theses and Dissertations . 270. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/270