Narratives of Memory and Ethical Silence in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of the shifting interplay between memory and ethical silence in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, focusing on The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and Klara and the Sun. Across these works, Ishiguro repeatedly constructs narrators whose engagement with the past is cautious, selective, and emotionally disciplined. Memory does not appear as a neutral record of experience; rather, it functions as a negotiated process through which characters seek coherence and psychological security, often at the cost of confronting uncomfortable moral realities. The paper argues that Ishiguro turns memory into an ethical instrument one that shapes how responsibility, guilt, and personal identity are understood while ethical silence operates alongside it as a strategy of self-preservation achieved through restraint, omission, and understatement.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that brings together narrative theory, ethical philosophy, memory studies, and posthuman thought, the analysis shows that Ishiguro’s moral conflicts are typically internal rather than overtly dramatized. Concepts of unreliable narration illuminate the tension between what narrators say and what remains ethically unresolved. Philosophical perspectives on alterity, responsibility, and narrative selfhood help clarify how selective remembrance and emotional control carry moral weight. At the same time, theories of collective memory and trauma reveal how social structures and institutional pressures shape individual recollection, while posthuman theory provides a lens for understanding ethical subjectivity beyond the human in Klara and the Sun.
A comparative reading of the novels reveals a progression in Ishiguro’s ethical vision. Stevens’s measured recollections mask political and emotional complicity, Kathy H.’s composed voice reflects deeply internalised institutional norms, and Klara’s attentive, non-human perspective suggests an alternative ethical responsiveness. Together, these narratives underscore Ishiguro’s enduring concern with how moral failure often arises not from dramatic wrongdoing, but from quiet patterns of avoidance, silence, and carefully managed memory.