Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and moved to England at the age of five. His mother and father were teenagers during the Second World War, and when the family settled in Guilford, it was amongst a community that twenty years earlier had thought of the Japanese as their enemies. In his acceptance speech for the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, Ishiguro observed that his deep affection for the generation of Britons who survived the war stemmed from those years in Surrey. Welcomed by and raised within a society committed to making a better world, it was impressed upon him that life was precious, and not to be wasted.
Like so many of Ishiguro’s characters, the narrators of The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) face death haunted by the suspicion that they have failed to make the most of their time on earth. The Remains of the Day’s Mr Stevens spent his life in dedicated pursuit of becoming a great butler, but with his former master dead and disgraced, and his beloved Darlington Hall in decline, he has little to show for his years of service. In Never Let Me Go, Kathy H, the last of her friends still alive, looks back at their seemingly idyllic childhood, and the steady dissolution in later years of the ties that had once bound them tightly together. Those long lost can however be retained in memory, and Kathy finds that in telling their collective story, she can give their lives some of the stature denied them by a cruel and indifferent world.
In this course, we will perform detailed readings of both novels, and seek to explore Ishiguro’s challenging portrait of how consolation might be found and dignity preserved when human beings are brought face to face with all that they have failed to achieve.
