Volume 6 Issue.1: 2019 Page No 143-148

 

 

Abstract

On the basis of trauma theory, this paper analyses the trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and its unique narrative strategy. A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro's debut novel. It is about a Japanese woman, Etsuko, who is exiled in Britain in middle age, and there is a certain area of her life that is very painful to her. It has something to do with her coming over to the west and the effect it has on her daughter, who subsequently commits suicide. She talks all around it, but she leave it as a gap. Instead, she tells another story altogether, going back years and talking about somebody she once knew, So the whole narrative strategy of the book was about how someone ends up talking about things they cannot face directly through other people’s stories. Since the middle of the 20th century, the works and research of traumatic literary have been emerging constantly, and traumatology has been continued to develop, which has gradually become an important branch of the study of literary trauma. Paying attention to trauma is not for cynicism, not for forgetting memories, but through reproductive trauma, allowing people to repair trauma in reflection. This paper aims to induce readers think more deeply about traumatic theory through the analysis of A Pale View of Hills.

Key Words: Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, Trauma, memory, narrative

 

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