Abstract
Global citizens in the highly competitive material world in the twenty-first century immerse themselves in an enigma, an enigma where they inevitably struggle in their career for fame and fortune as success but they insensibly alienate from their family in daily life. Kazuo Ishiguro, a newly-rising Anglo-Japanese novelist, explores musicians' enigma of how they can achieve success in the music circle in relation to how they can live in their marriage in happiness in Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009). The novel focuses its attention on what challenges a musician encounters in different career stages and how he faces the music and struggles for marriage and love in his different career situations, either rising or falling in the fierce business world.
In this essay, I examine Ishiguro's perspectives on musicians' career, from youth to seniority old together with their marital relationships, ranging from separation to reunion, through Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin's lens. In my argument, Ishiguro intends to provide his readers with consciousnesses in various examples of musicians and couples in relation in the novel to arouse open-ended meanings of career and marriage in the musicians' world, which the readers have freedom to comprehend themselves through the relation of the hero and the characters in each story. He aims to further provide his readers with an insight into both issues and with motives to reexamine, revalue and rectify theirs, from the constant alienation from marriage to the close connectedness to it, leading to true happiness in life. The novel as an utterance consists of five stories, each as an utterance per se, embedding Ishiguro's warning and suggestion as authorial intent, in the ongoing dialogue with other utterances in the aesthetic literary world.
Keywords: Bakhtin, Dialogism, Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes, connectedness, alienation, musician, marriage, career, success
Author Information
Yu-min Huang, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan
Paper Information
Conference: ACERP2013
Stream: Ethics; Religion; Philosophy
This paper is part of the ACERP2013 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Huang Y. (2013) Musicians’ Enigma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes ISSN: 2187-476X – The Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion & Philosophy 2013 – Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/2187-476X.20130222
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/2187-476X.20130222
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