Memory, Loss, and Identity in Contemporary Fiction Narrating the Self Through Absence

Abstract

Contemporary fiction returns obsessively to the entangled problem of memory, loss, and selfhood, treating remembrance not as a transparent window onto a stable past but as an unstable, revisable act through which characters construct rather than recover their identities. This paper examines how four novelists working in distinct registers of loss  Kazuo Ishiguro’s studies of professional and biological curtailment in The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Toni Morrison’s reckoning with the afterlife of slavery in Beloved, Julian Barnes’s meditation on retrospective self-deception in The Sense of an Ending, and Jenny Offill’s fragmented portrait of marital collapse in Dept. of Speculation  deploy unreliable narration, non-linear structure, and formal fragmentation as devices that mirror the unreliability of memory itself. Drawing on the philosophical tradition running from John Locke through Paul Ricoeur, and on trauma and postmemory theory associated with Cathy Caruth and Marianne Hirsch, the paper argues that these texts collectively stage a shift from a Lockean model of identity as continuous psychological retrieval toward a narrative model in which the self is an ongoing act of authorship performed in dialogue with what has been lost. The comparative analysis suggests that contemporary fiction’s formal experimentation with memory is not merely stylistic but constitutes a sustained argument about the ethics and epistemology of remembering.