カズオ・イシグロ作品にみる語りの間接性 : 「 空白」と「入れ子構造」の効果

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, there is a rich and meaningful “blank” or “gap” between “what is told” and “what is conveyed,” which gives birth to ambiguity or indirectness in his narratives. In this essay, which overviews several works by Ishiguro from his early period up to his more recent years, I analyze the function of this “blank/gap” in each work and clarify how its characteristics have changed over time. In particular, I pay attention to the development in his works from the “not told and told” method, seen typically in his earlier works heightening the effect of déjà vu, to his more recent method centered on “told and not told” that appears as a key phrase in one of his recent novels, Never Let Me Go. I also point out and build up an argument to demonstrate that this development is related to the foregrounding of a kind of “mise en abyme” (nested structure) of the narrative in which “narrators” also function as “narratees/readers”. The protagonists and 1st-person narrators in Ishiguro’s novels have two kinds of function at the same time: they function 1) as “narrators” who tell their own stories, deliberately hiding some important information, through which readers try to understand the hidden truth of the stories, and also 2) as “narratees/readers” who try to cope with vague external information and struggle to search for hidden meanings. I conclude that the second function has become more prominent in Ishiguro’s recent works, and that this shift has greatly increased the ambiguity and indirectness of his narratives. The “blank/gap” or “mise en abyme” techniques peculiar to Ishiguro’s narratives create “very powerful vacuums” which attract readers’ attention. Paradoxically, this works as a vehicle in which Ishiguro conveys his unwritten messages to his readers’ minds.