Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Cynthia F. Wong

SOURCE: Cynthia F. Wong, "The Shame of Memory: Blanchot's Self-Dispossession in Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills," in Clio, Vol. 24, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 127-45.

In the following essay, Wong employs literary theorist Maurice Blanchot's theories on first person narration to analyze Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills.

"… the necessary condition for the solitude of a madman is the presence of a lucid witness."

                                                —Blanchot

The first novels of the Japanese-born and British-educated contemporary writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, employ a deceptively simple narrative strategy to develop the remembrances of protagonists reflecting upon and finding a meaning for their personal lives. Speaking in the period after turbulent historical times, the first-person narrators set private experience into a public realm; they seek to induct a reader, a witness, into their stories. They make an admission that their seemingly ordinary tales will be insufficient given the limitations of memory but, in...
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