Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Self-Conscious Storytelling and the Crisis of Masculinity in Early Ishiguro

<p><b>This thesis engages with Kazuo Ishiguro’s three novels, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled, as united by a common theme: the crisis of masculinity. These texts, written in succession from 1986 to 1995, are Ishiguro’s first uses of male character narrators. This thesis takes this fact as consequential for the meaning of the works, as well as for the idea of their interconnection.</b></p> <p>I link the obscured tragedies often identified in Ishiguro’s narrators to the conflicting obligations they feel between their sense of themselves as men and their suppressed emotional lives. This imbalance between the private and public life is presented as a key conflict in Ishiguro’s work, one accessed through identifying crises of masculinity. A crisis for Ishiguro is triggered by the realisation of the impossibility of balancing these two lives. Discussing how professional identity is tied to masculine identity, I analyse the way unreliability emerges from the overprioritising of work. I suggest that in this way identity performance is key to unreliable narration and that these narratives operate as a reorganisation of the narrators’ biographies along the logic of crisis.</p> <p>However, rather than suggesting that Ishiguro’s true interest is on masculine crises, this thesis makes the case that by looking at this series of novels as different explorations of crisis, something new is revealed about the more documented interests of Ishiguro’s experiment—memory, unreliability, history, and storytelling. Through this claim I seek to demonstrate how an overlooked aspect of Ishiguro’s early work offers a fresh approach to his overall project. I combine established narratological analysis of the novels with this alternative perspective on the early works to analyse the way the author expands the bounds of readerly awareness, as well as the capabilities of narrators. In doing so I draw a causal chain between masculine crises, self-conscious narration, and violations of realism.</p> <p>Each chapter explores the related ways Ishiguro carries his interest in crises of masculinity forward. The first, on An Artist of the Floating World, analyses the novel’s sense of being self-consciously organised from within, expanding on the connection between a crisis of masculinity and authorial dispositions. The following chapter on The Remains of the Day takes up narratological theories on the implied author, the narratee, mimesis, and unreliability to examine the extent to which narrators can be aware of their unreliable narration’s effects. The final chapter reads The Unconsoled as Ishiguro’s “masterwork” on the crisis of masculinity. The chapter explores the ways the text acts as a heightening of the prior crisis novels to get a better grasp of this unusual work.</p>

Ekphrastic Self and the Dream House of (Re)Collection: Ishiguro’s ‘Artist’ in a ‘Floating World’

This paper examines the text’s material memory despite aesthetic ‘forgetfulness’ in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating Word. Repurposing traditional notions of ekphrasis—the literary description of visual art—to better understand the modern process of self-making, this essay offers Ishiguro’s ‘ekphrastic occasion’ as a tangible remnant that disrupts ideas of objectivity just as it fabricates them. Further, it claims that subjective narrative, such as first-person memory or vivid individual portraiture, often functions as a palpable archive even as it seeks to obfuscate the idea of an objective archive. In this way, material description, rather than adhering to Sebald’s post-war ideal of “unpretentious objectivity,” becomes instead a nuanced site of heightened subjectivity (The Natural History of Destruction 53). We see the “play of writing and reading the world” as an insistently fraught and self-conscious endeavor (Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto 152). Along these theoretical lines, this argument seeks to harness the idea of a ‘sentient’ archive to reframe the traditional relation between object (the novel) and subject (the reader) as one of mutual animation, breath, and correspondence.

Ruth Ozeki's Floating World: A Tale for the Time Being's Spiritual Oceanography

This essay explores the intertwined oceanographic and spiritual imaginations structuring Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, which she rewrote in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. A Tale for the Time Being's new, metafictional frame story dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know or understand necessarily mean coexisting with what cannot be known, discovered, or recovered.