Spatial ontology and the past in lazuo ishiguro’s the unconsoled and ‘a family supper’

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro’s lengthy novel The Unconsoled, published in 1995, and his short story “A Family Supper” bear resemblances to each other as the protagonists in both works take a journey to their past. Ryder, the protagonist of The Unconsoled, travels to a nameless European city, while the unnamed protagonist of “A Family Supper” travels back home to visit his father after his mother’s death. Ishiguro’s narration in both of these works functions to depict the journey of a protagonist to his past as a spatial restriction. The purpose of this study is to analyse these two texts by Ishiguro in terms of the existence of their characters in relation to their spatial ontology and their past to point out the relationship between space and memory.