An Artist of the Floating World | Literary Precedents

An Artist of the Floating World Literary Precedents

With Ono's narration, Ishiguro again employs a character sifting through the facts of his life to reach an answer, a mainstay of a great deal of first-person fiction. In the process of narrating their stories, Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Ira Holloway in Robert Olen Butler's They Whisper (1993) all come to some new understanding of their lives and change in subtle ways. Ono himself reaches an awareness of his complicity with the imperialists who led Japan into a disastrous war; this is a shift of attitude.

In this novel's narration, Ishiguro continues to refine his use of the unreliable narrator, a narrator whose judgments of the facts of the novel may be colored by his or her experience to the degree that they alter the story he or she tells. Huck...
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