
Title: Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics
Author: Laura Colombino
Publisher: Routledge
Year of publication: 2025
Volume in the series: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature
ISBN: 9781032660677
Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics addresses the philosophical issues that lie at the heart of Ishiguro’s fiction, shedding light on the moral condition of his characters – their sense of responsibility and pride in service, their attempts at self-determination and the value they assign to loyalty, love and friendship. Ethics in Ishiguro’s work is structured around the tension between the limits of the characters’ agency and their striving towards the good. On the one hand, they are tied to the existential condition of being in the world, which acquires a distinctively Heideggerian quality of thrownness; on the other, they aspire to the good in the Platonic sense. Ishiguro’s novels are shown to tackle fundamental ethical questions posed by ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and modern Western ones, from Adam Smith through Jean-Paul Sartre to Martha Nussbaum. What is the human soul? What is dignity? What does it mean to be human? These issues are expressed in his narrative world through the universal and timeless language of myths, allegories and images that are both ancient and modern as well as cross-cultural. The book makes use of onomastics and intertextuality to uncover unexpected layers of philosophical, literary and artistic allusions with which Ishiguro shapes his ethical concerns.
Details: Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics – 1st Edition – Laura Colombino – Routledge