Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), this paper argues, can be read in the context of Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. Of particular significance is Freud’s interest in the figure of Oedipus as one who reads. This paper, following Pietro Pucci’s line that Oedipus’s life as a result of the prophecy is governed by both telos and tukhê, shows that Ishiguro’s novel exposes the ways in which the narrative order in the line of the text depends on the intervention of chance to preserve its apparently natural progression towards a determined end. These interventions manifest in the novel as a series of uncanny repetitions, the textual equivalent of the crossroad where, in a chance encounter, Oedipus slays his father. The crossroad, ensuring that what is fated comes to pass, seems to serve the death-drive by guaranteeing that the authored text becomes a death sentence. However, this paper finds that, at the crossroad, not only is the fated and death-defined narrative preserved, but a twin lineage is also generated by life-giving chance, so that birth and death do not occur only “in the beginning” and at “the end” of Ishiguro’s novel. What emerges instead is a figure of the reader as one who is created and who creates. The reader is both that which is written, like Fate, and dies with the text which authors it, and that which lives to ensure that what once was written is written again.
School of Languages, Literature, Culture and Communication; Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences