Individual and collective memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Remains of the Day'

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Tiago Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Umbach, Rosani Ketzer
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Literatura e Autoritarismo
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.ufsm.br/LA/article/view/39338
• topic: Kazuo Ishiguro; The Remains of the Day; Reliability; English literature; memory; Kazuo Ishiguro; The Remains of the Day; Confiabilidade; Memória; Literatura de Língua Inglesa

The novel(s) of Kazuo Ishiguro puts into question the human memory - the capacity, reliability, fallibility, and combustibility - as well as its representation in an individual, collective and cultural sphere. In The remains of the day (1989), Ishiguro confronts the reader with the figure of Stevens, who constructs a narrative of the “I” through a process of recollection. Given that Stevens's memory appears far distant from the recollections of other witnesses, to deal with the reliability of this character narrator in the reconstruction of a historical past becomes an issue. This paper intends to offer a reading on the theme of memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, The remains of the day, focusing on its individual and collective representation, this mainly through Maurice Halbwachs' theory of individual and collective memory. The dialogue demonstrates that the social dimension has an effect on how the protagonist recalls his own story and shapes the past of the Other(s).