Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction offers a profound exploration of memory as an ethical force that shapes personal identity and collective moral consciousness. His narratives foreground characters who engage in selective remembrance and strategic forgetting in order to preserve dignity, emotional stability, and social belonging. However, this self-protective relationship with memory often results in moral evasion and ethical blindness. This paper examines the ethical implications of memory and forgetting in The Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, and Never Let Me Go. Through an analysis of individual and institutional memory, the paper argues that Ishiguro presents memory as a moral responsibility rather than a neutral psychological function. By exposing the dangers of self-deception and collective amnesia, Ishiguro’s fiction challenges readers to consider the ethical necessity of honest remembrance in the formation of identity.
Dr. Varsha Saraswat Yasmeen Khan (Sat,) studied this question.