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ФИО автора: Begmatova Sokhiba Mustafayevna
Uzbekistan State World Languages university
Название публикации: «THE MOTIVE OF LONELINESS AND VARIANTS OF
ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN THE NOVELS OF KAZUO ISHIGURO»
Annotation: This article explores the motive of loneliness
in the works of Kazuo
Ishiguro.
The protagonists of the author’s work are confronted with various
manifestations of loneliness, and unfortunately the fate of all of them ends tragically.
Key words: romanticism, existentialism, loneliness, communication, isolation,
homeless, abandonment.
The feeling of total loneliness is characteristic of a person of Western culture and
arises along with the idea of individuality and uniqueness of a person:
if a person is
unique, he will never be fully understood by others. This feeling reaches its peak first
in the literature of romanticism, and then in existentialism.
The loneliness of the
romantic consciousness is heroic; it is an indispensable sign of its uniqueness. “It is
both an unacceptable and a desirable state at the same time”: it is both a way to escape
from the imperfection of the world, in which a romantic turns out to be superfluous,
and a way of spiritual growth and self-improvement, loneliness as a state and as a goal.
The loneliness of existentialism, genetically akin to romanticism, is of a different
order. If the loneliness of romantics is the lot of a few chosen ones, then the loneliness
of existentialism is an inevitable state of everyone, generated by the fundamental
impossibility of understanding the Other. In the literature of the turn of the 20th-21st
centuries, loneliness remains the same
impossibility of understanding, giving rise to
the meaninglessness of dialogue.
The total loneliness of the heroes of Ishiguro is what makes them painfully search
for themselves, trying through the experience of pain and mistakes of the past to
understand and accept themselves in the world.
The main way to convey the feeling of loneliness of the characters is the lack of real
communication between them and the lack of even the desire for communication. The
youngest daughter of the heroine of the novel “Where the hills are in the haze”, Nikki,
says about the death of her sister: “People did not know what was happening to me. I
didn't say anything to anyone. Probably lost. They would not understand, they would
never understand how I feel. And Keiko's reluctance to interact with the outside world
eventually becomes voluntary seclusion: the girl locks herself in a room and takes her
own life.
In fact, the image of Keiko in the text is the quintessence of loneliness and
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lack of real contact with other people and one's own family. Moreover,
this future
loneliness of Keiko can be traced already in the image of little Mariko: other children
do not play with her, she is afraid of strangers and cannot establish contact with her
own mother, who simply does not hear her. Sachiko is also lonely, but her loneliness
is expressed differently: Sachiko does not hear anyone but herself, argues with herself,
convinces herself and is completely unable to establish contact with the outside world.
Through the lack of communication, the estrangement between father and daughter
is also expressed in the novel “The Inconsolables”: a half-toy, childish conspiracy of
silence degenerates into an adult inability to speak with the closest person and the need
to resort to the mediation of third parties. he most terrible emblem of loneliness in “The
Inconsolables” is the isolation of almost all the characters from the family: the narrator,
preparing for the performance, unsuccessfully expects his parents (who, as it turns out,
were not at any of his concerts); in the family of the owner of the hotel, the father and
son are unsuccessfully trying to get the attention and recognition of the mother, who
herself does not know what prevents her from showing her love; As a result of this
alienation, Stefan's contact with his father is also lost. All the characters in the novel
come to the end inconsolable in their loneliness.
An interesting feature is that in both novels the characters are in a state of relocation,
they do not have their own home: “And yet I clearly remember that none of us was
going to live here permanently: we seemed to be waiting for the day when we could
move to a better place” - Etsuko recalls her life in Japan, while in the present she
discusses with Nikki the need to move to another house, smaller.
Upon arrival in the
city, Ryder settles in a hotel, and later, in a conversation with Sophie, he recalls that
they have long been looking for a house where they could all live together - but in the
finale he leaves further, to the next city, and parted with his family: “ Leave us. You
have always watched our love from the sidelines. And now? Now you are watching
our grief from the sidelines. Leave us. Go away.” 74 Sophie would tell him before
leaving forever. This observation from the outside, non-intervention is another emblem
of the total misunderstanding of the Other - which, by the way, runs counter to the
“mission” declared by Ryder himself.
The inextricable connection between the motives of loneliness and orphanhood in
the novel “When We Were Orphans” is obvious. The protagonist is also deprived of a
home, deprived of national identity and turns out to be a stranger both in Shanghai,
which
thinks of his home, and in England, where he tries with all his might and
unsuccessfully to "pass for his own". Remembering Christopher in his school days, his
friend will exclaim: “God, you were so wonderful at school!”. Christopher, like his
beloved Sarah, has no family (Sarah's husband will disparagingly call her "tramp").
And the main character makes the search for the lost family and home the mission of
his whole life. Sarah's life in general is a constant escape from loneliness: husbands,
celebrities, a dream of a happy little family that she will tell Christopher about ... and
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a teddy bear, which she has been carrying around with her since childhood as an eternal
reminder of her real homelessness, of irresistible loneliness. Etsuko, by the way, lost
her parents in the bombing.
In Ishiguro's next novel, a
whole group of widows appears, separated from their
spouses for eternity, wandering alone and restlessly around the world; a child without
a family, and a family without a son.
In the novel “Never Let Me Go”, the motive of loneliness is also associated with
the concepts of family, home and love.
Clones, themselves produced by simple
doubling of parental cells, are biologically unable to have children. In the opinion of
"ordinary" people, the very feeling of love, as a result of which loved ones become a
family, is not available to them.
The loneliness of clones is their natural state, this is
the loneliness of machines, devoid of the ability to feel and experience.
So, the motive of loneliness in all the novels of Ishiguro is revealed in similar ways.
Firstly, it is the emotional delimitation of the characters from the surrounding world,
which is realized in the inability to dialogue; secondly, it is their isolation from the
family and
longing for the abandoned home, which becomes longing for the past in
general. Just the motif of loneliness expands its functions from novel to novel,
correlating first with individual characters, and then with humanity as well.
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