Volume 6 - Issue 17 (2026-08-20)

The Fragmented Self in Postmodern British Fiction: Narrative Disintegration and Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and A. S. Byatt's Possession

Researcher: Haider Jaber Husain

Ministry of Education - Open Education College - Karbala Study Centre -Iraq.

The postmodern British novel has always questioned the unity of human identity, understanding the self not as a fundamental entity but rather as a construct which is continuously destabilized by language, memory, and narration. This paper discusses the image of the fragmented self in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995) and A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990). Although the novels employ different narrative techniques, both works deal with the destruction of subjectivity to a significant extent. With the help of theoretical approaches based on poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and narratology, it becomes possible to show that Ishiguro's dreamlike narration creates a phenomenological fragmentation, as the identity of the protagonist collapses into the structure of his own unconscious. At the same time, in Byatt's historiographic metafiction the self is fragmented in time, as the identity is constructed through an intertextual process of rewriting the archive. In conclusion, both works demonstrate that in the postmodern era the self can exist only as an unstable construction of texts and is always absent from itself, as it is dispersed in texts which try to represent it.