earticle

영어

This essay examines the reconstruction of the past in Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel, A Pale View of Hills. The novel shares a postmodern understanding of the past with ‘historiographic metafiction’ that blurs the boundary between truth and fiction, or history and story. Etsuko, the unreliable first-person narrator of the novel who now resides in the English countryside after her daughter’s suicide, offers an unauthoritative account of her past in Nagasaki that centers on her brief friendship with Sachiko. Her recollections are full of self-justification, gaps, omissions, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that partly stem from the mysterious relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. Although many critics have explained Sachiko as one side of Etsuko’s split personality, I suggest that the parallels between the two women are constructs of Etsuko’s memory. Instead of faithfully re-collecting post-war Japan, the narrator reconstructs her past by reinterpreting the significance of the choices she made and by using Sachiko’s story as a detour to her painful past that she does not want to recall. The past reconstructed through Etsuko’s memory defies the distinction between what is fictional and what is real. On the other hand, A Pale View of Hills diverges from ‘historiographic metafiction’ by privileging private memory over public history. In A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro raises doubts about any attempt to monopolize, finalize, or idealize meanings of the past.