Trauma and Narcissism in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro: Inner Worlds of Borderline Survival

Kazuo Ishiguro’s international best sellers explore trauma, including failures of dependency, and the universal, life-long struggle between narcissism, a protective psychological defence and object-relatedness. He points to the needs of ordinary people for a sense of dignity and self-worth and writes of their hopes and expectations in love and work, and the bewilderment and pain that comes of disappointment. Evoking both pathos and detachment in the reader, he penetrates a significant area of contemporary, psychological experience.

Using post-Kleinian key concepts, this book details the trauma, the type of narcissistic defence demonstrated by behaviours, and the way the conventions of Ishiguro’s six novels are gently subverted to show the depletion of the self.