Narrative and Interstices in Chang Rae Lee’s and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

초록

This paper, aiming to analyze Asian American novelists’ works philosophically, has four purposes. First of all, by comparing novels written by Chang Rae Lee, born in Korea and immigrated to the U.S., and Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan and immigrated to the U.K., this paper explores post-ethnic, post-diasporic narrative and its strategy as well as various meanings of embedded ‘interstices’ in both narrative and ideological background of the novels. As theoretical scaffoldings, the paper uses Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of interstice and Heideggerian ideas of ‘uncanny’ and ‘homelessness.’ Interstices also embody dialectics of difference and its intervention into two authors’ colonial differences. Second, the paper focuses on two facets of interstices in both writers’ novels such as ‘homelessness’ and ‘uncanny,’ mediated by ‘return of the repressed’ formed through colonial history and both novelists’ political unconsciousness. Third, the paper investigates another interstice within narrative in which complicits as protagonists and unreliable narrators disclose ethical antinomy formed through victims’ hidden voices. Last, the paper discusses how both novelists create a common poetics in which the universal and the difference become a formal interstice.

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