Sunday, June 26, 2011

"The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Consciousness reality (objective reality perceived by the awaken mind and the symbols of language) and sub-consciousness reality (the world of the dreams) are interconnected, inhabit the same realm.

Ryder lives in the dream and travels to reality the same way we live in reality and travel to the internal dream. In the novel both realms are switched: reality is dream, and dream is reality. This furthers Kafka’s technique, for it makes the full crossover to the other side. In the dream, Ryder is an omniscient being, the same way it happens to us in a dream, where we see all like in a movie and have access to all that happens inside each of the characters’ minds.

• Topologically, Ishiguro also furthers the physical Kafkaesque landscape:
• In a dream time and space are beyond the laws of mechanical physics
• The very dark and the very luminous
• The places we dream of from childhood in a recurrent manner
• Space and time lose meaning and substance and shift shape

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