Memory and Kazuo Ishiguro's Novels: A Review

www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) Memory and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels: A Review Kasturi Sinha Ray Research Scholar Department of English Faculty of Arts Banaras Hindu University Abstract Memory studies have always been very intrinsic to the study of literature. The Booker winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro deals with the various nuances of memory with special references to the unconscious, trauma, forgetting, rewriting memory and unreliability of the narrative/narrator in his novels. This article aims at briefly introducing the discourse on memory studies right from the ancient times with reference to both the western: Aristotle, Locke, Habwalchs, Freud, Rossington, etc; as well as eastern trends of enquiry: the Vedic literature. The extended discussion on memory right after the „memory boom‟ in the 90‟s provides a niche to further investigation into Ishiguro‟s novels which uses memory not only as a narrative style but also as a device, as a technique and even as the unavoidable cause of the eventuality of the narrative texture. The secondary sources: five books, an interview, a book review and a research article, which are alluded to in this essay reveal the author‟s artistic potential in delineating the characters and their process of reconstructing their identity from their often doubtful recollections. However, the psychoanalytically potent narratives inquire into the unconscious as well which eludes cognitive treatment and is betrayed in the gaps and silences. Keywords: Memory, Kazuo Ishiguro, Unreliable Narrator, Smriti, Unconscious. Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 292 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) Memory and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels: A Review Kasturi Sinha Ray Research Scholar Department of English Faculty of Arts Banaras Hindu University The Booker winning British novelist and author of screen plays and short stories, Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most gifted writers of the twenty-first century who incorporates the streamof-consciousness in his works where in the various nuances of memory, recollection and forgetting are subsumed. To discuss with regards to the novels by Ishiguro, how memory weaves the experience of trauma, loss, regret, unrequited love, death and as such is the focus of this paper. With reference to Coleridge‟s utter failure in „remembering‟ the „rest‟ of Kubla Khan, one may find interesting in itself, the „art‟ of forgetting. This definitely added an element of incompleteness to his personae which otherwise would have left him at ease. He states, “Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. But the to-morrow is yet to come”(Coleridge,5). Here Coleridge perhaps betrays a certain amount of regret at not having been able to completely remember one his masterpieces. The existence of one‟s identity is mostly based on one‟s ability to recall every experience of his/her life right from childhood. According to Luke Mastin in his “The Human Memory – Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 293 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) What It Is, How It Works and How It Can Go Wrong”, memory is the re-construction of past experiences by synchronous firing of neurons that were involved in the original experience. The action that involves the encoding process of memory in the human brain can better be compared to a kind of collage or a jigsaw. Memories are not stored as books in a library but are in fact onthe-spot reconstructions from elements scattered throughout the various areas of the brain. The encoding process initiates as soon as the brain is stimulated due to arousal of particular kinds of emotional responses triggered by the respective incidents. Whenever an individual goes through a set of encounters with the outer world the brain takes up each and every stimulus as a part of the process of comprehension and in order to facilitate further communication. The replication of the same codes in the same pattern generates memory. Ishiguro‟s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982. It tells the story of a woman who remembers her days in postwar Japan before moving to England with her second husband, an Englishman. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Prize by the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was translated into thirteen languages. This was followed in 1986 by An Artist of the Floating World. Set in postwar Japan, the novel recounts the experiences of a painter who had supported militarism in the 1930s. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was nominated for the Booker prize. Ishiguro's most popular novel, The Remains of the Day, was published in 1989. It won the Booker in 1989 and was made into a successful film in 1993 by Merchant-Ivory Productions starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movie eventually garnered eight Oscar nominations. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, was published in 1995 to mixed receptions. Its formal experiments, lengthy dream sequences, and opaque Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 294 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) construction left many critics nonplussed. In contrast, Richard Rorty mentioned in his 1995 review article Consolation Prize that Ishiguro had "expanded the frontiers of the novel," although he found the work itself obscure, suggesting that "sometimes all a reviewer can do is express appreciative puzzlement". When We Were Orphans was published in 2000. Set in London and Shanghai, it relates the experiences of a celebrated detective who tries to unravel the mystery of his parents' disappearance in Shanghai in the early years of the previous century. The 2005 Booker nomination Never Let Me Go (2005) is a dystopian science fiction novel by Ishiguro. Set in a contra-factual version of England in the late 1990‟s, the novel focuses on the life and recollections of Kathy H. She is a clone and lives with other cloned children of her institution, Halisham, waiting to be harvested for organs and their subsequent donation to the normal people. The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel, published in March 2015.The novel revolves around the relationship of married couple Axl and Beatrice who are stuck in time where it is difficult to recall things from one‟s past. Both Beatrice and Axl embark upon a journey to unveil the secrets of their past believing that it will make their love stronger but they encounter many difficulties on their way, due to the consequences of their past. Memory dominates Ishiguro‟s novels. At respective instances, it acts either as the axis, or as the substrate, or even as the key to the further unraveling of the narrative. The characters, their actions, as well as the traces of their memory in various moods and settings bring about both the movement in his plots as well as the greater universal appeal in his works. The importance that has been attributed to memory in Ishiguro‟s novels closely resembles that of Nemesis in the Greek Tragedies. Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 295 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) In The Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens, the aged butler, only remembers his father, also a butler, once when he came to Darlington Hall and served for a short period of time. For not being allowed to wait a table (the most honourable duty of the profession) due to his extreme old age and sudden collapses, Mr. Steven‟s father perished a disappointed man. Miss Kenton, the most able housekeeper who always had tender feelings for Mr. Stevens, dominates the rest of his memories right next to Lord Darlington and his mansion, even decades after they had separated. The reader might question these memories and the sincerity with which they are recollected (hence the space for the unreliable narrator). For example, a father is presumably an inseparable part of one‟s existence who happens to have a paternal figure for a considerable period of time. And yet on one hand Mr. Stevens fail to mention his octogenarian father as the former‟s experience of a lifetime apart from describing his actions in Darlington Hall as per his memory of him. On the other hand Mr. Steven‟s precise remembrance and testimony, depicts his master the Lord as an ideal man who otherwise is accused of treachery against his own country. The two aspects of the same character bring about numerous deductions to a critical eye. One may deduce an utmost formal relation of a father and his son and/or the inability of a character to recall sufficient information due to his devoted adherence to the role of an ideal butler to Lord Darlington. It might also offer a critique to the various ethnic issues that are addressed regarding a person's behaviour. In A Pale View of Hills the author writes: Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 296 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today.(41) In a way, Etsuko‟s confessions of her unreliable memory paradoxically make her seem more reliable. The reader often feels that a narrator, who admits to having flaws in his or her story, will not consciously deceive or lie. But gradually the reader realizes that this is merely an attempt to disguise her self-deception. The fact of her guilt in driving her elder daughter Keiko to the verge of suicide gnaws at the deepest level of her unconscious. Ishiguro in an interview with Mason says, “The meanings that Etsuko imputes to the life of Sachiko are obviously the meanings that are relevant to her [Etsuko‟s] own life”. This behaviour is quite inconsistent with remarks by Sachiko such as “what is of the utmost importance to me is my daughter‟s welfare” ( A Pale View of the Hills, 19). Something very similar to this remark of hers resonates with Katherine Ann Porter‟s short story He(1927), where the mother cruelly treats her mentally undeveloped child and yet goes on bragging off to her neighbors how much more love, affection and care she provides „him‟ with, in comparison to her other normal children. In both the cases the mother figure constantly tries to come to terms with her guilty conscience. Perhaps the only difference lies in the fact that Etsuko has sought shelter in „false memory syndrome‟ by the help of which she recollects the memory of a woman and her daughter whom she befriended in Nagasaki. The reader eventually realizes that those characters are representation of Etsuko‟s attempt at rewriting her memory of the past. The discourse on memory in the twentieth century includes numerous brains and their intensive studies. Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), whose most important works are Les cadressociaux de la mémoire(On Collective Memory, 1925) and La Mémoire collective (The Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 297 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief Literary Herald www.TLHjournal.com ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) Collective Memory, 1950), explored the social structures of memory. Halbwachs‟ work has furnished the recent ideas on commemoration and public memory with preceding patterns and frameworks. He pays attention to the special circumstances of remembering and to those aspects that most often are neglected by the historians. During the first half of the twentieth century, the attention gradually shifted from individual to collective memory. „Collective memory‟ refers to remembrances formed by society and culture. Halbwachs claimed that “there are no individual memories at all, since all memories [...] are only meaningful within the social frameworks (cadressociaux) of the groups [...] to which an individual belongs” (Henke, 81). Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead in their book Theories of Memory (2007) chisels out a sharp contrast between memory and history, preferring memory as the pure and primitive form of history and seeing them almost as opposing entities. An observation made in the movie Memento states: Memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the colour of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts. (qtd. Heiremans, Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and A Pale View of Hills) Considering another instance from Stephen Greenblatt‟s essay Resonance and Wonder (1990): “The Museum‟s rich collections of synagogue art and the historic synagogue buildings of Prague‟s Jewish town,” says the catalogue of the Jewish State Museum, form a memorial complex that has not been preserved to the same extent as anywhere else in Europe.” “A memorial complex”---this museum is not so much about artifacts as about memory, and the form the memory takes is a secularized Kaddish, a commemorative prayer for the dead….And it seems wholly absurd, even indecent, to worry about the relative artistic merits of the drawings by children who did not survive.(Greenblatt, 46) Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 298 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) Both opinions contradict each other, paving way to various interdisciplinary fields of discussion. They reflect the importance of history as a core to building upmemory. However, Greenblatt maintains a more empathetic outlook towards memory. The artifacts no longer are the survivors from the past but the emblems that represent the memories of those who made them. Condemning memory as irrelevant in presence of history injures the recognition of human intellect and its capabilities. Similarly, Rosington and Whitehead suggest that memory shares an equal plane if not more in building up contexts. The discourse on memory in Indian context dates back to the ancient Vedas. Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi in one of his various lectures (translated by students of B.I.T.S. Pilani), assembled in the form of a book named Hindu Dharma(1995), clarifies the connection of Smriti, Sruti and that of the Vedas: The sages had intuitive knowledge of the Vedas. As mentioned so often they did not compose them - they saw them. They used their intelligence to examine what they saw and, remembering it all, […] This they gave us in a codified form called „Smriti‟. As I said before "Smriti" means memory. For the sages the Vedas constituted an experience that just happened to them. The Smritis or the Dharmasastras are derived from their memory of it. We go to Kasi and worship at the temple of Visvanatha there. Many days after our return home, we go to the local temple which has a sanctum of "Kasi Visvanatha". At once we remember the experience we had of seeing the deity Visvanatha at Kasi. In between for many days, that is between our visit to Kasi and to the local temple, we had no memory of this deity. We come across so many people every day but we hardly think of them later. But, when we happen to see them subsequently, we tell ourselves: "Ah, we must have seen them before somewhere." In between there was no memory of the people. This "in between state" is called "samskara" or "atindriya". In that state there is an impression of our experience within us. When this impression manifests itself as an Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 299 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) "expression" we have "Smriti" or memory. All told, Smriti is the result of our experience and samskara an impression of that experience within us. (112) In his On Memory and Reminiscence(350 B.C.E), Aristotle states that memory is about the past, in contrast to judgment and prediction, which have the future as subject, and perception, which is about the present. Aristotle already remarked upon the difference between habit and conscious memories, although he did not call them that. He considered „remembering’ an action which can be performed by many animals, but only human beings can „recollect’, which can be done consciously and deliberately. To the Roman rhetoricians, memory was an indispensable asset. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke identified the self with memory. He saw one‟s identity to be completely determined by one‟s memory and someone who did not remember anything of his or her past had in fact no identity, or no sense of self. Mary Carruthers‟ The Book of Memory (1990), offers fresh insights into the function of memory in the medieval world by drawing on instances relating to the role of memory in the works of Dante, Chaucer, and Aquinas to the symbolism of illuminated manuscripts. In the words of Carruthers: The difference is that whereas now geniuses are said to have creative imagination which they express in intricate reasoning and original discovery, in earlier times they were said to have richly retentive memories, which they expressed in intricate reasoning and original discovery. (58) Authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Yeats, Arnold employ memory as an artistic device as well. Sigmund Freud‟s A Note upon the “Mystic Writing-Pad” (1925) proposes a new metaphor of memory. Freud claims that paper, pen and wax tablets fail to do justice to the Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 300 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) special features of memory and therefore, he proposes a „mystic writing-pad‟ with two separate layers which represent the conscious and the unconscious memory: Now some time ago there came upon the market [...] the „Mystic Writing-Pad.‟ [...] It claims to be nothing more than a writing tablet from which notes can be erased by an easy movement of the hand. But if it is examined more closely it will be found that its construction shows a remarkable agreement with my hypothetical structure of our perceptual apparatus and that it can in fact provide both an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the notes that have been made upon it. (qtd.Theories ofMemory, 115) Writings on the first layer of the writing-pad can be erased, while the second layer keeps a permanent copy of them. Thus, the mystic writing-pad is comparable to the mind. In this respect one may also refer to the first chapter of Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (2000), where Douwe Draaisma argues that the computer is the modern day equivalent of Freud‟s mystic writing-pad. The computer acts as a „quasi-mental‟ device which can “absorb, delete and reproduce information”. Freud‟s records of his various cases of patients suffering from hysteria eventually enabled him to propound the theory of the unconscious. Thereupon he went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego, launching memory studies into a new era of psychoanalysis. With memory established as an undeniable literary force, during the twentieth century and especially since the beginning of 1990s, substantial amount of research endeavors have been channeled towards memory studies to counter historian Alon Confino‟s assertion that the field „lacks critical reflection method and theory‟ (Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method). There has also been a renewed and increasing interest in memory, a phenomenon which has been called by scholars the „memory boom‟. Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 301 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) The implementation of memory as a technique is different from the connotative significance of memory as context. Memory not only carries on the narrative but also becomes the very context in which the characters finally identify themselves. Memory problematizes the narrative and soothes the narrator. This aporetic moment conceives the existence of the „unreliable narrator‟ which is subjected to discourses devoted to memory studies. Ishiguo‟s novels champion the amalgamation of both the instances: memory as a technique and as the context. YuginTeo in his book Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory (2014) addresses the question of how memory works in Ishiguro's novels. Dr. Teo takes recourse to Paul Ricoeur's theory on memory and several other theorists on mourning, trauma and collective memory, while introducing a unique conceptual framework that investigates the distinctive and cathartic work of memory in Ishiguro's novels. He analyzes recollections with reference to forgetting, testimony and release. The book reveals the link of the memory of the characters, with their fragments of past which often is hides beneath the layers of traumatic experiences or ethical forgetfulness. The author also engages with his interpretation of the characteristic features of every protagonist where they relive their memories purposively for nostalgia and mourning. Szederkenyi Eva Katalin in her book Deciphering Gaps and Silences in Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels (2015) raises and satisfies various question related to memory as a significant factor in invoking as well as betrayed by various gaps and silences in Ishiguro‟s novels. Gaps and silences are of lurid, floating character, eluding cognitive approaches, revealed upon focused analysis. The book discusses the extent to which silence is provocative in deflecting injurious details of the past and also the writer's artistic craft constructing the layers of protagonists' Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 302 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) distorted narration. The book also addresses the Ishiguro‟s artistic techniques in bringing about the character of an unreliable narrator. It also takes up the early novels of Ishiguro and explores their scope through post-structuralist narrative discourse analysis and psychoanalytic literary criticism. In Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum Critical Perspectives)(2010), Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes addresses Kazuo Ishiguro‟s concern with creating discursive platforms for issues of class, ethics, ethnicity, nationhood, place, gender and the uses and problems surrounding artistic representation. As a Japanese immigrant who came to Great Britain in 1960, Ishiguro has used his unique position and fine intellectual abilities to contemplate what it means to be British in the contemporary era. This work traces the main themes throughout Ishiguro‟s writing while paying attention to his short stories and writing for television. It includes a new interview with the author, a preface by Haruki Murakami and discussion of James Ivory‟s adaptation of The Remains of the Day. Cynthia F. Wong‟s Kazuo Ishiguro (Writers & Their Work)(2005) is the first full-length study of Ishiguro and his works, up to 2004. This book explores his uses of memory and its unreliability in narrative, his manipulations of desire and how humans reinterpret worlds from which they feel estranged, struggling with the silence of pain and the awkward stutters of confusion and loss. This book examines his subtle and ironic portrayals of people in 'emotional bereavement' and it situates Ishiguro as an important international novelist by looking at his constructions of personal and political histories. Ishiguro continues his formal experimentation in Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 303 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) narrative voice with subsequent work and emphasizes the necessary, yet futile spirit that envelops many of his characters. Recollecting Memories, Reconstructing identities: Narrators as Storytellers in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go (2013) by Silvia Caporale Bizzini is a most illuminating research exploring the myth of the narrator as a storyteller „both in the Benjaminian and the Ardendtian sense‟. The book examines the narrative strategy that links the narrator‟s construction of his/her identity to their fragmented memory which is a part of their strife in order to come to terms with their unresolved past. In October 2000, Kazuo Ishuguro was interviewed by Linda L. Richards, the editor of January Magazine. And he disagrees to assigning downright unreliability to the narrator of When We Were Orphans. Ishiguro presents his own views, saying: The traditional unreliable narrator is that sort of narrator through whom you can almost measure the distance between their craziness and the proper world out there. That's partly how that technique works, I think. You have to know that distance quite clearly. He [Christopher Banks] is perhaps not quite that sort of conventional unreliable narrator in the sense that it's not very clear what's going on out there. It's more an attempt to paint a picture according to what the world would look like according to someone's crazy logic. So a lot of the time the world actually adopts the craziness of his logic. It's not full of people doing surprised double takes when he comes out with certain statements. On the contrary, they go along with it. They all seem to support these weird notions. (qtd. Richards) From this above excerpt one can argue with the previously established traditional outlooks towards an unreliable narrator. It raises some questions regarding the perspective of the narrator for being awarded little or no importance at all. One may follow the traditional pattern of construction of the unreliable narrative: trauma followed by formation of memory, a Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 304 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) considerable amount of interval and eventual recollection, rewriting/forgetting if necessary, giving way to direct or indirect communication. But this pattern fails to question Ishiguro‟s notion of an unreliable narrator which doesn‟t fit in the trend. One may easily question: where does the comprehension of the narrator stand? If the narrator is indeed unsure of what is going on in the outer world then we do not but only thrust our opinions undermining the point of view of the narrator himself. In a review article in March 2015 issue of The New Yorker, titled The Uses of Oblivion: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Buried Giant”, James Wood observes: […]in his new novel Ishiguro runs the great risk of making literal and general what is implicit and personal in his best fiction. He has written not a novel about historical amnesia but an allegory of historical amnesia, set in a sixth- or seventh-century Britain, amok with dragons, ogres, and Arthurian knights. The problem is not fantasy but allegory, which exists to literalize and simplify. The giant is not buried deeply enough.(13) Axl and Beatrice embark upon a journey to seek their son and suffer induced amnesia amidst a misty road. The giant which symbolizing memory is fading fast but even when it is buried it pushes through time and again only to stir and upset the equilibrium of the surface above. It is a brilliant piece of metaphor. The characters fail to fit into the reader‟s expected mould of an unreliable narrator and his issue with recollection and dealing with trauma, and ventures forth into the domain of being individual „historical‟ sufferers. Ishiguro ingenuously detaches the reader from realism and dissociates the mind to produce the desired effect. In an interview conducted by Susannah Hunnewell for The Paris Review titled “Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction”(2008), Ishiguro recollects, “There was a review of The Remains of Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 305 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) the Day in The New Yorker that appeared to be a glowing review right up until the end. Then it said: the trouble with this is that everything works like clockwork” (qtd. Hunnewell). It is evident from the review in The New Yorker that Ishiguro not only uses the scope of memory and its historical counterpart as the terra firma to develop the plot of his novel but also uses it to prepare the background for a suitable narrative style. The narrative itself is too perfect to rely upon. This deficiency of realism betrays the narrator‟s repressed, erring human self. The famous Butterfly effect discovered accidentally by Edward Lorenz in 1961 has since caused a worldwide stir and psychoanalytic field of studies have time and again taken this phenomenon up as an apt metaphor to symbolize the relation of the conscious and the unconscious. When it comes to Ishiguro‟s characters, memory is something the characters cannot outrun and after surrendering they try to cope. They speak of it unknowingly. Their unconscious keeps „tugging‟ at them. The conscious guarded by the strict conscience fears to fall back on. Billy Joel sings of the need to remember and forget in his signature song Pianoman(1973): He says, "Son, can you play me a memory ? I'm not really sure how it goes But it's sad and it's sweet and I knew it complete When I wore a younger man's clothes." -------------------------------------------It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday And the manager gives me a smile Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 306 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) 'Cause he knows that it's me they've been comin' to see To forget about life for a while.(5-40) Works Cited Aristotle. On Memory and Reminiscence. 350 B.C.E Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Recollecting Memories, Reconstructing Identities: Narrators as Storytellers in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go” AEDEAN: Asociaciónespañola de estudiosanglo-americanos. 35. 2, 2013, pp. 65-80. Print. Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture.Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print. Coleridge, S.T. Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep. London: William Bulmer and Co, 1816. Print. Confino, A. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method”, American Historical Review, 102(5), 1997, pp. 1386–403. Print. Draaisma, Douwe. Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 43.4, 1990, pp. 11-34. Print. Groes, Sebastian, Sean Matthews. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum Critical Perspectives). London: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2010. Print. Vol. 2, Issue 4 (March 2017) Page 307 Dr. Siddhartha Sharma Editor-in-Chief www.TLHjournal.com Literary Herald ISSN: 2454-3365 An International Refereed English e-Journal Impact Factor: 2.24 (IIJIF) Halbwachs, Maurice, The collective memory. Trans. Mary Douglas. New York: Harper & Row Colophon Books, 1980. Print. --- On collective memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Print. Heirmans, Dorien. Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and A Pale View of Hills. Diss. University Gent, 2008, http://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/001/289/350/RUG01001289350_2010_0001_AC.pdf.Accessed 3 Feb, 2016. Henke, Christopher. “Remembering Selves, Constructing Selves. Memory and Identity in Contemporary British Fiction.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures,volume 10,2003,pp. 77-100. Print. 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