Traumatic Experiences: Doldrums and Anguish in the Select Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

The paper mainly aims to explore the traumatic experiences including pains, pangs of suffering, loss, and anguish of the protagonists’ past lives in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and The Unconsoled. Though they recollect their memories, they do not narrate them directly in the novels. The objective of the paper is to bring out how each protagonist uncovers their own traumatic experiences slowly through other characters in the novel is explained. The paper also examines the representations of emotions in the notions of nostalgia, narrative, and trauma as how the protagonists of each novel suppressed their emotions for so long in their life and why did they do that is mentioned. Ishiguro’s characters in the novels have projected different aspects of human life. Mainly the existence of suffering is examined from the existentialist point of view with the purpose to accept whatever happened in the character’s life as it is without complaining about them.