Elements of the Dreamlike and the Uncanny in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

This essay examines Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled in terms of an uncanny dream narrative. The Booker Prize winner’s most puzzling novel – with its frequent departures from realism – conjures up a unique logic combining the elements of the dreamlike and the uncanny. By making reference to certain basic notions of Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, the first part of the essay exemplifies numerous parallels between the mechanisms operating in the novel and the mechanism of dream work (such as temporal and spatial compression, displacement, wish-fulfilment). The latter part focuses on Freud’s notion of the uncanny as prescribed in his 1919 essay and the manifestations of the uncanny in The Unconsoled, which include the prevalence of the strangely familiar, the sense of being split, doubled, lost, the instability of identity and the experience of déjà vu.