History and Fiction in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Pale View of the Hills”

Abstract

Given that the complex relationship between history and fiction has been among the never-ceasing topics of discussion, and has even been additionally problematized in the age of postmodernism, the objective of this paper was to analyse Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of the Hills, primarily addressing its treatment of history; the dialogue between the past and the present; the subjective vision of history conditioned by different perspectives; and the two types of history opposed in the novel – public and private, i.e. collective and individual history. The narrated past events in the core of this novel take place on two different, yet mutually connected levels – the wider-ranging level of public history and momentous historical events, on the one hand, and the narrower level of personal, individual and highly biased history, on the other. By successfully intertwining these two aspects of history in A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro underlines exactly what we have defi ned as the essence of the postmodern problematizing of history – i.e. its qualities of being elusive, perspective-conditioned and impossible to ascertain.