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At the end of the 1990s, A Pale View of Hills (1982) was published, and Kazuo Ishiguro appeared in public, attracting the attention of the European literary community with his oriental writing. There are some monographs on Kazuo Ishiguro, which focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, exploring themes such as depression, loss, trauma, memory mechanisms, identity, and homeland, as well as the narrative and rhetorical devices of the novel. The critical perspective of foreign literature on the studies of An Artist of the Floating World mainly focuses on three aspects: themes, narrative techniques, and culture theories.

In thematic research, foreign scholars mainly focus on identity and trauma. For the characters in Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, identity has long been one of the themes that scholars have focused on. Foreign scholars often compare An Artist of the Floating World with Kazuo Ishiguro’s other works, and believe that the protagonist of this novel, like the protagonists in other works, experiences an identity crisis and finally reconstructs his identity. Lalrinfeli C. examines all aspects related to memory and identity, and how identity is constructed by memory and special narrative strategies [2]. He mainly focuses on the problematic ways to forming Ono’s identity. Tellini argues that after the war, Japan is colonized by the United States, and American culture becomes mainstream, affecting the young generation in Japan, so there is a gap between the young generation and the elder generation [3]501.

2 Identity of Unreliable Narrator in An Artist of the Floating World

2.1 Two Identities of Ono

From Phelan’s point of view, the one figure “I” in the character narration consists of two identities of narrator and character [41]1. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono is the narrator who holds the information of the whole story, and he is also the main character in the novel. Character narration is Phelan’s user-friendly coinage for the standard homodiegetic narration. It means a protagonist living in the story world to tell about it [40]1. Through the characterization of Ono, reader can clearly understand struggle of the Japanese militarist who suffers the great social pressure after the WWⅡ, so his account is unreliable. It is of great significance to analyze Ono’s double identities, so reader can get a deep understanding of Ono’s unreliable narration. 

2.1.1 Ono as a Narrator

Memories are the special narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, and in an early interview, Kazuo Ishiguro talks about the impact of his obsession with memories on his creation, “But things like memory, how one uses memory for one’s own purpose, one’s own ends, those things interest me more deeply [43]14.” Time and memory interfere with factual reporting, thus facilitating the narrator Ono’s unreliable narration. Kazuo Ishiguro is very good at using the convenience of recall, such as the control of time and space, in fact, you can really imitate the fluidity of the mind, especially when recalling, you can embed a fragment of one occasion into a fragment of another occasion 30 years later, and then go back to another scene, a larger scene, and before the memory ends, it may turn again and move to another scene [44]137. This digressive narration of space-time transformation is also a manifestation of unreliable narrations. Specifically, Ono employs three narrat本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。