Ishiguro's Generational Conflicts

Abstract

Published in 1986, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World has inspired many scholars to analyze his peculiar writing style and the use of a rather Japanese sensibility to reach a western audience. Ishiguro’s work is a thorough critique of the attitude the post War Japan took regarding its war criminals. By building on the work of other scholars and focusing on Barthes’ theory on mythology, this thesis employs a semiotic analysis to dissect the intentions and true relations of the characters in this novel. While it is an unusual approach, Ishiguro’s work is so subtle it has to be deciphered using the same tool as him, words. By looking at the use of the most commonly used words in the novel, the research should show how miscommunications can alter relationships, opportunities, and entire courses of lives. The research tries to establish semiotic analysis as a tool of analysis when dealing with seemingly the same discourse in different generations.