石黑一雄《別讓我走》中的死亡、記憶與哀悼

This thesis aims to explore the ethical implications and aspiration in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005). Inspired by Jacques Derrida's discussions on the subject of reckoning with the dead other, the research project comprises three correlated thematic investigations into the novel: death, remembrance and the work of mourning. The first-person narration of the novel is treated as a literary work of mourning, manifesting ethical concerns about the relationships between the living and the dead, between the present and the past, as well as between self and other. The first thematic analysis on loss in the novel concludes with the philosophical connotation that the force of death is a ubiquitous gaze cast upon the living. The second part of this research project suggests that the novel treats the narrator's remembrance of past lives as an art of living in the present. The theme of the third part focuses on the manners of reckoning with constituent traces of otherness. With her autobiographical reckoning with the dead others, the clone narrator of Ishiguro's novel is going through a process of self-reckoning vis-a-vis an egoistic society's rejection of its clone members. In sum, all of the thematic investigations reveal otherness as constituent and productive in the formation of individual or collective subjectivity. Both a tale of alternative history and a literary work of mourning, Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go reckons with modern memories in an imaginary way, refracting ethical concerns about the social situation in the contemporary world as well as an ethical aspiration for a more tolerant future.