Volume VI Special Issue VI September 2026

Name of Author : Ms Anvee

Title of the paper : Concealment as Survival in the Female Characters of Kazuo Ishiguros A Pale View of Hills

Abstract: Kazuo Ishiguros A Pale View of Hills 1982 presents a narrative structured around memory, trauma and the psychological strategies through which individuals manage unbearable guilt and loss. This paper examines the defence mechanisms employed by the novels female characters, primarily the narrator Etsuko and her acquaintance Sachiko, as coping strategies in response to personal trauma, cultural displacement, and maternal guilt following the atomic devastation of Nagasaki. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Freudian and post Freudian concepts of repression, denial, displacement, and projection, this study argues that Etsukos unreliable narration is itself a defence mechanism, allowing her to distance herself from responsibility for her daughter Keikos suicide by projecting her own experiences onto the seemingly separate figure of Sachiko. The blurring of identities between Etsuko and Sachiko, and between Sachikos daughter Mariko and Etsukos daughter Keiko, is read as a textual manifestation of dissociation and splitting, wherein traumatic memory is fragmented and reassigned to protect the self from unbearable acknowledgement. The paper further explores how silence, evasion, and selective memory function as narrative-level defence mechanisms that mirror the psychological suppression practised by the characters themselves. By situating these mechanisms within the broader context of postwar trauma and immigrant displacement, this paper contributes to existing scholarship on unreliable narration in Ishiguros fiction and offers a psychoanalytic framework for understanding female subjectivity, guilt, and survival in his early work.

Keywords : Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, defence mechanisms, psychoanalytic criticism, unreliable narration, trauma, repression, displacement, maternal guilt, dissociation, memory, postwar Japan

DOI :

Page Number : 191-194