Book Review and Explanation: The Unconsoled
This post contains no spoilers unless you choose to see them.
This post was written by a non-AI humanoid.
Although it reads like one long dream, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro is more realistic than it may first appear. The narrative is confused, meandering, and at times nonsensical, but as a map of the human psyche it proves to be astonishingly accurate.
Specifically, this is a book about people caught in unresolved (and seemingly impossible) inner conflicts. The author seems to have rediscovered – or at least portrayed – the psychic processes that were mapped and described (and mostly ignored) by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, 80 years ago.1
The Narrator
The narrator’s experience of the world is muddied and confused. This makes for a story that is often inscrutable, even frustrating to read.
However, when we realize that the narrator Ryder is a neurotic – specifically of the compliant type – we start to understand his inner confusion that permeates the narrative. As Horney wrote describing “alienation from self”:2
It is strange and even startling that a person who is not asleep and has no organic brain disease does not know who he is, where he is, or what he does or has been doing. […] There are for instance many neurotics who live as if they were in a fog. Nothing is clear to them. Not only their own thoughts and feelings but also other people, and the implications of a situation, are hazy.
This exactly describes the condition of the narrator of The Unconsoled as we follow, horrified, his lapses in memory, judgment, and basic perception of time and space.
Of the three neurotic trends described by Horney (moving towards, against, or away from people), he seems to move towards people: a compliant type, a people-pleaser. He spends much of the book getting entangled in other people’s problems, often oblivious to his own (such as losing control of his schedule). Like any compliant type, he has repressed aggressive tendencies, which occasionally burst out as inappropriate and unmodulated anger.
And like all neurotics, Ryder is carried on by a glory drive. This is the unconscious impulse to pursue the idealized self, an imagined view of oneself. This is patently clear: he imagines himself to be the savior of the city he only just arrived in.
The Dream Figures
Whether the dream figures are parts of Ryder’s psyche, real people from his waking life, or merely invented characters, they all accurately portray various aspects of Horney’s theory.
Mr. Broski is the arrogant-vindictive type: seeking adulation and lashing out at people who wrong him. (For example, this is symbolized by his ruthless driving of the orchestra in his final performance. He also shows little feeling for his deceased dog and talks about his lover, Miss Collins, as a sexual conquest.)
The hotel manager Hoffman is another compliant type who clearly displays self-hatred and self-sabotage, especially towards the end of the story.
Sophie is a detached type: estranged from her father, standing by herself in parties, and often seeming not to hear what the protagonist is saying to her. She hardly ever displays affection, in contrast to the narrator (love is much more important for compliant types).
Interestingly, Horney’s concept of the real self seems to appear in the character Stephan, the only character who makes constructive moves towards growth. He unlocks his tremendous latent ability to play piano, plays for himself when his parents leave his recital, accepts applause without false humility or arrogant pride, and at the end decides to move away from his parents and his city. It is even more interesting that this is the only happy ending in the book – none of the other “pseudo-solutions” (Horney’s term for instinctual but ineffective attempts to resolve inner conflict) in the book resolve or end favorably.
Horney’s concept of externalization also permeates the novel. Throughout, various aspects of the environment seem to uncannily correspond to the narrator’s mental state. Externalization is perhaps most noticeable in the names of the fictitious musical pieces: “Glass Passions” describing the glassy, unreal emotional experience of a neurotic, and “Verticality” is the glory drive in one word (the glory drive being the upward retreat from the real self toward a glorious, idealized self).
What is the Dream Saying?
The book plainly reveals what it’s all about near the end. The narrator’s parents never arrived to hear his recital, a fact that he refused to see until he was forced to, at which point he broke down sobbing. We also find out that this expectation-and-disappointment cycle happens at every one of his recitals: an unresolved loop.
Neurosis starts in childhood, and this was the original wound. His drive to please his parents (compliance) became his glory drive, manifesting in his drive to become one of the world’s greatest pianists and also in his urge to save the cities he travels to.
The final pages of the book then continue with the dream showing the deep, monumental loneliness behind this wound. After realizing that his parents didn’t come, everyone around Ryder suddenly loses interest in him. He tries to eat breakfast alone, no seat available for him. His own wife and son reject him. He prepares to fly off to Helsinki – remote, cold, and dark – all by himself.
As tears well up in his eyes, his compliant trend reasserts itself and he soon loses himself in company and conversation. The book (and the dream) ends with no resolution.
Conclusion
Although this is a review, kind of, it is impossible for me to rate such a book. As a story, it borders on the ludicrous, and can be a frustrating slog to get through. But as a map of the psyche, it is almost perfect. And that is the nature of psychic disturbance: ridiculous, infuriating, repetitive, and rarely finding true resolution.
The Unconsoled is an uncomfortable work of art that makes us think – and more important, feel – about where we ourselves may be caught in the impossible and the unresolved.