| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 97 === The main focus of my thesis is each chapter's consideration of an individual search for home, involving either or both physical and cognitive movement. However, they also come together through exploration of a series of related and interconnecting themes. One of these is “home desiring” and the other is “home making”. The thesis consists of five chapters.
The introduction, Chapter One, begins with a short summary of Kazuo Ishiguro’s personal background and how his Japanese-British breeding influences his writing. In Chapter Two, I discuss that Ogata-San's nostalgia towards the glorious days before the bomb fell in Nagasaki and his breeding enforce him to serve his country with absolute fidelity, love and devotion. He believes that the country represents his only family, his only home. His incapability of negotiating different levels of loyalty and orientation to his fallen country makes him restless and dislocated in the transformed Japan. In Chapter Three, I chiefly deal with Etsuko and Sachiko's intention to travel and migrate to foreign countries. Etsuko physically keeps moving from Japan to England, the apartment complex to the English countryside and psychologically from the traumatic past to the oblivious present. Through the discrepant memories and discontinuous stories, she strives to relocate herself in the new context of home and redeems her unspeakable guilt of bringing her elder daughter, Keiko to England. Sachiko keeps moving—from Tokyo, her uncle's house in Nagasaki, the cottage on the river side in Nagasaki, then to America—in order to rebuild a home she imagines being free and full of opportunities. Her experiences and means of orientation are divorced from the stable locations. She is in the hands of the unfamiliar surroundings which lead her to be unable to feel totally at home. Chapter Four aims to manifest Keiko and Mariko’s vulnerability to resist their mothers’ insistence and enforcement to bring them to nowhere they can identify with and feel belong to. They never feel inside a place. As a result, they are always on the road to search for a homely home. In concluding chapter, I reiterate the analysis of A Pale View of Hills and the mechanism of home desiring and home making which designates a process of being continually remade through a process of contact and interchange. Home does not illustrate a fixed image of a harbour or a shelter any more. It is not a stabilized construction which waits to provide the homeward bound travellers with warmth but it is the home goers who decide where home is and what it should be like.
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