Collapse of Narrative: A Study of Narrative Distance in the Confessional Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro's Work

Abstract

This paper is a prelude to another forthcoming paper which applies H P Grice's conversation theory to the study of the narrative in the postcolonial writing of Kazuo Ishiguro in finding out the ‘source of unreliability’ of the narrator. This paper aims to set off with the building of a theoretical framework for such discussion of the unreliability hidden in the confessional narrative in postcolonial writings. The primary goal of this essay is to examine the role of the narrator within the narrative discourse and his/her position in the story discourse through a stylistic analysis of Ishiguro's linguistic choice in shaping his narrator and characters. The analysis firstly focuses on the examination of mood and mode at the syntactic level of the narrative of A Pale View of the Hills (1982) and differentiates, if any, the ways the character-narrator (Etsuko) constructs her ‘Japanese’ voice and reveals her experience and secrets. The analysis is then further going into the examination of the variation of the tone used in the narrative and story discourses. Harnessing the discovery of the similarity of the linguistic markers used, the study will lead to a better understanding of the process of the blurring of the boundary between the narrator-self and the narrated-self. The ultimate goal of this paper is to uncover the separation yet confusion between self, language and voice in a narrative which contributes to the diminishing distance between the two levels of discourse and subsequently to the collapse of narrative in the confessional narrative in Ishiguro's novel.