Kazuo Ishiguro’s Authoritarian Narrators:An Artist of the Floating World,The Remains of the Day,Never Let Me Go, and the Authoritarian Personality

Abstract

AbstractThis essay examines how Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrators – namely, those of his novelsAn Artist of the Floating World,The Remains of the Day, andNever Let Me Go– are all variations of one central theme: the authoritarian personality. By drawing on the findings of the eponymous study by Theodor W. Adorno et al., it analyses the role of the narrators’ respective upbringings in the formation of their authoritarian predisposition as well as how their authoritarian tendencies later manifest themselves in their conduct. The way these tendencies – or the limitations imposed by them on the narrators’ imagination – also manifest themselves aesthetically in the narrative discourse further allows a comparison to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann inEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.