AUTOBIOGRAFIJA KAO RAZOB-LIČENjE U SLIKARU PROLAZNOG SVETA I OSTACIMA DANA KAZUA IŠIGURA

Abstract

This paper explores the narrative strategies employed by the homodiegetic narrators-protagonists of two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, to oppose the ironic de-facement of their narrative identities, which they consider to be stable and ethically non-questionable. The analysis of the novels employs key terminology borrowed from deconstruction, hermeneutics, and the poetics of postmodernism, as well as theoretical insights regarding the dethroning of metanarratives which stipulate absolute presence. The interpretation of these novels points to an ironic deconstruction of both the diachrony and synchrony, i.e. the continuity and coherence of Masuji Ono’s and butler Stevens’ narrative identities, produced within their testimonies in the form of diary-like instalments, which aim at maintaining their identity configurations based on dignity that they had absolute faith in and, simultaneously, at partially rewriting them under the pressure of the new symbolical order which places additional demands for adjustment in each instalment. Perspectivism, i.e. Ono’s and Stevens’ narrow perspectives, de-face their autobiographical narratives; however, the formative narrative strategies eventually win over because the de-facement can only be performed and sustained within the limbic space, while the narrative iterations and intertextuality that produce subjectivity continue producing it even after the cathartic humbling of the protagonists.