Realism, Dreams and the Unconscious in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

A critical consensus has emerged about the themes, modes, narrative techniques and interrelationships of the five novels that Ishiguro has published to date. The first three — A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989) — have been celebrated for their historically grounded realism, achieved through the limpid, masterfully controlled prose styles of their first-person narrators, all of whom depend upon memory as they look back over their troubled lives and times. Realism in fiction is a vexed concept, but it can be defined as the attempt to use linguistic and narrative conventions to create a fictional illusion of social and psychological reality that seems plausible to ordinary readers. Writers of realist fiction, David Lodge comments, assume that ‘there is a common phenomenal world that may be reliably described by the methods of empirical history’; however, he adds that ‘to the later writers in the [realist] tradition what this world means is much more problematical’.1 In other words, although the novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a shared view of the nature of reality, those of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are generally aware that what constitutes reality is a matter for speculation and debate. Neither is contemporary realism usually premised on the belief that the language used to describe what Lodge calls the ‘common phenomenal world’ is a transparent medium that creates a perfect correspondence between its symbols and an objective reality external to it.