Writing the Inner Voice: Kazuo Ishiguro, Irony, and Dialogic Inner Speech

While the post-1990s cognitive “turn” in the humanities has produced many models for understanding literary texts, it has occurred amid the broader decline of literary formalism, which prioritizes a text’s formal qualities. Consequently, technical questions of how literary narratives represent inner voices remain underexplored. My report addresses this through Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, which feature first-person narrators telling their stories as extended inner monologues. The central tension – the narrator recounting key recollections from his/her life, while also visibly avoiding that life’s more painful episodes – opens these monologues to interpretation as examples of inner speech. Using Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, I investigate the especial importance of dramatic irony in this tension, and how it signifies aspects of ironic process theory. I posit that dramatic irony and ironic process theory highlight a dialogic pair of voices operating in the narrator’s mind, which I label the “expanded” and “condensed” voices. I argue that reading Ishiguro’s novel from this perspective renders it a nuanced study in how humans experience dialogic inner speech. Such an interpretation advocates for further formalist approaches in cognitive literary studies while offering a blueprint for how scientific ideas around inner voices operate within literary frameworks.