The Aspect of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's 'A Pale View of Hills'

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2006 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 1,0, Universität Mannheim, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: It is widely accepted that human memory constitutes identity: We need to have individual memories in order to experience biographical continuity. Without the episodic (or autobiographical) memory, it would be impossible for us to link our individual past to ourselves. The strong connexion between memory and identity is a very prominent topic in contemporary British fiction and the significance of memory is discussed in many literary works. One of this books is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel A Pale View of Hills. In this novel, Kazuo Ishiguro concerns himself with memories and their problematic function in the process of forming one's identity. All of his novels he has published so far deal with "individuals scanning their past for clues to their identity, loss, or abandonment." This also applies to A Pale View of Hills. The novel, Childs summarizes, "is a gentle meditation on memory and sublimated pain, which uses fantasy and displacement to reveal indirectly the distress of a woman who has lost her homeland, her husbands, and her elder daughter." In the following, I will first outline the plot of the novel. Then I shall want to concentrate on memory as a means to create identity and to avoid responsibility. I shall also discuss the unreliability of the narrator. As we will see, this unreliability enables the reader to decipher the narrator's memories. At last I shall try to answer the question how the main protagonist in the novel uses his memory to overcome a loss by transferring her guilt onto an imagenary character.