Remembering the Traumatic Wound in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction
Remembering the Traumatic Wound in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: Memory is one of Kazuo Ishiguro’s favourite themes. In all his novels, Ishiguro creates characters who struggle with their past and conscience, who constantly revisit their past, oftentimes a traumatic one, in an effort to come to terms with it. All his writings deal, in one way or another, with memory and forgetting, both at an individual and societal level. Ishiguro takes a special interest in the psychological effects of trauma, persisting in memory from childhood into middle and old age. He shows how his first-person narrators maintain human dignity and self-esteem, by resorting to specific psychic defence mechanisms and the related behaviours, characteristic of narcissism.

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