Teleology of the Self: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.

摘要

This dissertation examines how Murakami Haruki’s aesthetics of narrative inform his politics regarding Japanese history and its place in the collective unconscious. Through close readings of the novels A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84, I delineate Murakami’s magical realist vision of the self, and the human imperative to narrativize experience. This literalized search for self takes place against the totalizing discourses of institutions such as the state or cults, which supply coherent, teleological, and seductive master plots to vulnerable individuals in place of their daily struggle towards self-definition. Through the use of variant temporalities, metatextuality and achronological structure, and recourse to the simulacral, cinematic and corporeal as alternative modalities, Murakami presents alternatives to plotted narratives such as imperialist progress, which accounts only for history’s victors and a singular, state-sanctioned experience of wartime Japan. By departing from a linear novel form, Murakami compels the reader to occupy multiple subject positions and to reevaluate a passive reception of the ‘authoritative’ text. Lastly, I show how Murakami suggests social responsibility and dialogue as a means of anchoring one’s narrative in reality and establishing a proper continuity of the self.