From Suppression to Narrative Reconstruction: Unreliable Narration and Trauma in The Remains of The Day and Atonement

This article examines the relationship between unreliable narration and trauma in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Although the two novels differ in historical setting, narrative structure and stylistic organization, both demonstrate how traumatic experience is mediated through memory, silence, distortion and belated confession. In Ishiguro’s novel, Stevens’s narration is shaped by emotional repression, professional ideology and an inability to confront personal loss and moral complicity. In McEwan’s Atonement, Briony Tallis’s narrative authority is destabilized by guilt, retrospective reconstruction and the ethical impossibility of repairing the damage caused by her childhood misinterpretation. The article argues that unreliable narration in both texts is not merely a technical device but a psychological and ethical mechanism through which trauma becomes narratable. Using narratological, psychoanalytic and comparative methods, the study shows that both novels move from suppression toward narrative reconstruction, yet neither offers complete healing. Instead, they reveal fiction as a space where memory is revised, responsibility is negotiated and the limits of testimony are exposed.

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