calmly relates how she and her boarding-school classmates acquiesce to their fates as clones whose only purpose is to donate their organs until they “complete.”Ī masterful portrait in self-deception, Etsuko of A Pale View of Hills relates the shocking story of an unfit mother and her troubled daughter, revealing unsettling parallels to her own tragic relationship with a daughter who committed suicide. Stevens of The Remains of the Dayhas dedicated his life to being the perfect butler, hyper-vigilant in upholding the customs and conventions of the British class system, eternally loyal to a now-deceased master who disgraced himself by siding with the Nazis, so subservient to his identity as a servant that he passes by his last chance for love. Refusing to admit to any wrongdoing, he lives in smug complacency, even when the realities of post-war Japan intrude upon his carefully constructed cocoon of rectitude. When forced to acknowledge his sins, he excuses his actions as those of a patriot who was only acting in the best interests of his country. The protagonist of my favorite Ishiguro novel, An Artist of the Floating World, is perhaps the author’s most traditional unreliable narrator, deliberately diverting the reader’s attention away from his past as a propagandist for the Imperialist regime in Japan. They are unreliable not because they are lying to the reader, but because they are lying to themselves.
Not showboats like notorious con artists Humbert Humbert or Holden Caulfield, who willfully bend facts to their advantage, but law-abiding, everyday people who remain loyal to an ideal even after they realize that the ideal is corrupt.
Ishiguro, who favors the first-person viewpoint, is master of the unreliable narrator. This year, I congratulate them on their inspired selection of Kazuo Ishiguro, “who,” according to the committee, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Though I don’t always agree with the Nobel Prize in Literature’s choices (cough, Bob Dylan, cough), it’s their award to bestow, and I thank them for celebrating literature and doing their part to keep it relevant.
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