Abstract
Upon leafing through the pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, it is easily discerned that there is a laudable attempt on the part of him to make of history an integral part of the fabrics of his novels. There is a remarkable endeavor to plow up past events and paint them with a tinge of fiction. There is that constant oscillation between the past and present. The narrative structure of his novels is fundamentally carried through the memories of their characters including the protagonists- the first-person narrators. Taking this into account, there is a ringing plea to question the rationale behind Kazuo’s heavy reliance on memory and deliberate use of history. This article seeks to shed light basically on the conjectural dimension of history use in Ishiguro’s literary works, focusing namely on A Pale View of Hills, When We Were Orphans, and The Buried Giant. Keywords: Conjectural history, facts, opinions, interpretations, forgetfulness, and journey DOI : 10.7176/JLLL/56-02 Publication date :May 31 st 2019
Highlights
Being concerned with history is deliberate for Kazuo Ishiguro
On March the 17th, 2015, in an interview conducted by Tina Srebotnjak in the Appel Salon, he expresses his interest “in this question: how does a nation, how does a society decide when it is better to remember things? And when it is better to keep certain dark memories just buried?” He states that many “societies grapple with this question: to what extent should we remember our past? To what extent should we forget it?” Really important to note is that Ishiguro’s use of history is basically conjectural in nature
This concept of conjectural history was first used by Dugald Stewart in the 1790’s in his biographical account of his friend Adam Smith
Summary
Being concerned with history is deliberate for Kazuo Ishiguro. According to him, the act of remembering or forgetting the past is a societal issue. In so many instances in the novels of Ishiguro, the use of history is conjectural in the sense that he has resource to imagination and fiction to fill in the gaps which do not allow a better understanding of several historical events.
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