Memory, Gender, and the Predicament of Modernity: A Study of Identity Narratives in A Pale View of Hills and The Sense of an Ending

Abstract

This study constructs a three-dimensional analytical framework integrating memory narratives, gender politics, and critiques of modernity through examining Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, aiming to investigate how individuals construct identity amidst historical ruptures and cultural transformations. The paper argues that protagonists Etsuko and Tony represent two typical modern dilemmas-“excessive history” and “deficient history” respectively-while gender power operates as a hidden thread profoundly shaping their narrative strategies and identity formation. Etsuko’s memory ambiguities and self-silencing reveal women’s dual repression under postwar Japan’s patriarchal order and modernization impacts, whereas Tony’s memory deceptions reflect both the decline of male authority and the moral subject’s weightlessness in postmodern context. Through cross-cultural comparison, this research demonstrates that memory serves not merely as narrative object but as gendered existence practice and power contestation field, with identity construction occurring not only within time’s flow but being consistently constrained by specific power structures. Both works ultimately converge on a core proposition: narrative becomes the individual’s final homeland amidst modernity’s ruins, while its forms and possibilities remain inevitably marked by gender and history’s profound imprints.