When We Were Orphans

Ishiguro utilizes the forms of historical and crime novels to explore the theme of memory and how it affects individuals, especially those for whom memory represents a key feature in structuring a functional idea of Self. For Christopher Banks, the protagonist, memory is a living space he inhabits regularly, within which he creates and recreates the notions of himself as a person. The recollections of his idealized childhood in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China, form the backbone of how he experiences himself as a grown-up. He needs those memories because what came after has been a sequence of traumatic experiences that his consciousness refuses to acknowledge or admit into his personal makeup. Since the beginning of the novel, the readers witness discrepancies between his view of himself as a young adult and of how others remember him. This makes Banks an unreliable narrator, but, more importantly, an unreliable personality because he shows uncertainty as to the veracity or dependability of his own recollections (often through conflating several episodes into one functioning memory).

The historical narrative places Banks and others in past time periods of which they speak from an unknown present moment, so each