Displacement and Alienation in The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

newline In my thesis titled Displacement and Alienation in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro I have attempted to look into the mode of displacement from the discourse of a psychological cognitive shift. This thesis chronicles how displacement works as a psychological defense mechanism to help the narrators of Kazuo Ishiguro deal with their past trauma, loss and loneliness. Besides that, I have attempted to show how these narrators undergo acute alienation in the present times, due to their inability to acclimatize their present circumstances, while remaining engaged in their act of recollection. Moreover, Alienation is studied not certainly in the Marxian discourse, rather in the context of memory and the aftermath of loss. The issue of alienation is re-examined as a psychological condition, a disorder and above all a liberating component. This thesis attempts to examine aspects related to home, displacement, memory, nostalgia and self and its thematic centrality in Kazuo Ishiguro s select novels in the context of post war era. In view of the narrator-protagonists psychic shifts regarding their painful past which they ambiguously confess in their narrative, I have made an honest endeavor to highlight on how the narrators are psychologically displaced. My work has focused on Ishiguro s four novels that are; A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), When We were Orphans (2000) and The Uncounseled (1995).