The Suppression of meaning in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

Abstract

This article focuses on Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and the way the language of the novel suppresses meaning. After illuminating the concept of meaning suppression and its formation, the study offers two strategies with which meaning suppression is manifested: the unreliability of the narrator and the employment of the figurative language. The influential Factors in the unreliability of the narrator which contribute to meaning suppression are: first-person narrator, memory telling, discursive habits of the narrator and the contradiction between scenic presentations and commentaries. The other strategy contributing to the suppression of meaning in the novel is the figurative language. The figurative devices in this novel deviate the meaning from its conventional process of understanding and pave the way for the formation of meaning suppression. The devices to be discussed in this article are metaphor, metonymy, irony and euphemism each of which play their roles in fulfilling the goal of the study. The study, by bringing evidence from the text, highlights their contribution to the goal of the research. What the study proposes as a result is the way meaning suppression or more specifically, the unreliability of the narrator and the figurative language, deviate the meaning from the normal process of meaning formation.