Encountering the Impossible History: Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans

• Main Authors: Tien-Yu Lee, 李恬毓
• Other Authors: Chun-San Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/54553005399239319130

碩士 === 中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 95 === Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans delineate the protagonists’ insistent and belated quest for the lost self and the impossibility of the retrieval after the traumatic event. The return to the past via speech or writing in order to regain the once complete self is an unrelenting task, for the survival of the trauma narrator is based on the integrity of his or her subjectivity. However, the return is at the same time impossible for at the first encounter--is in conflict with the rational and logical means of language. Besides, when the past serves as the site of both nostalgia and trauma, the return itself becomes ambivalent and even hazardous for the traumatized. This thesis aims to explore the dilemma of the trauma narrators in Ishiguro’s two novels, and to study how Stevens and Christopher cope with trauma and relocate their selves via narrative even though a coherent and cohesive remembrance of the past is rendered unattainable from the very beginning. Rather than treating trauma as an event outside human history, this thesis attempts to suture the gap between trauma and history and to reread the impossibility of trauma as a painful but necessary component of human subjectivity and society. Therefore, the narrative is no longer a repeated act of the passing on of trauma, but an ongoing journey of survival by way of constantly negotiating and compromising with the traumatized identity as the one and only self that the subject can retrieve in his post-traumatic life.