It is worth noting that people know readily that each person’s lifetime and experience begins from childhood, young age, to middle age, and to older phase. This is why Banks simply presents his story in the order after his configuration of his experience before his middle age and then starts from his friend Osbourne’s visit, instead of starting directly from his most cherished childhood. In fact, he delays with some foreshadowing. With his mock detective setting, he deceives readers into assuming that there may be a crime which has happened before, and there may be a sleuth that exists in the story. In any case, readers would simply follow Banks’s emplotment of his story as the novel is narrated in its sequence. It is his configuration that is not chronologically stated by Banks, but he specifically sorts out major
transitions into the novel’s parts which make it appear more sequential. Banks’s configuration of his life also assists him in hermeneutically reflecting on his past self so that his narrative is not as straightforward as it ought to be if his past events are to
be shown chronologically as they occur. The detour of the narration aids readers in understanding multiple aspects of Banks’s becoming or changing self in relation to others and himself.
The novel begins in medias res (“in the middle of things”) after his childhood and his years at the boarding school have passed. Though readers know at the end of the story that the events before his stays in London in 1958 are all happenings of the past, Christopher Banks still narrates his story in the first-person point of view. That is to say, he presents his past self as a character in his story of bygone days. As we know, Banks’s past self as well as readers are in the dark about what has actually happened to his parents, or what the truth is in the past. Like Banks’s past self, readers are eager to find out what reality is about his parents. Banks’s past self and readers desire to become or act as detectives, embark on or participate in the quest to go back to China, and then uncover all the clues to fulfill the mission as well as feel the sense of
accomplishment after the truth of crime is revealed. The narrative related by Banks’s past self, who is bewildered by the missing of his parents and his loss, is to
deliberately make readers sympathize with his eagerness to figure out everything unknown to his most important case about his parents and also make them join in Banks’s role as detective to search for all the clues or try to perceive the people’s behavior around him that used to bewilder Banks immensely. Readers suspend their disbelief to concentrate on Banks’s narration and follow his text step by step in order not to miss anything crucial about his life and his parents’ case, thereby making
themselves act like sleuths while reading the novel. Childs points out the sheets within sheets of the package which encase his magnifying glass that Banks receives from his school friends. This birthday gift serves as “[a] good metaphor for the narrators’
investigations into the layers of their own lives” (Childs 129). The scene is vividly
described by Banks: “[a]s I set about opening it, I quickly realized the package had been wrapped in numerous sheets, and my friend would laugh noisily each time I removed one layer, only to be confronted by another. All the signs, then, were that I would find some joke item at the end of all” (Ishiguro, Orphans 8). Indeed, when readers follow Banks through his narration, they know that he is a character who is more emotion-prone and less of a protagonist who puts his emphasis on telling readers about his ratiocinative ability himself. Rather he boasts about his fame and superiority in terms of morality which reemphasizes his obsession about his childhood memory so that it is fair to say that “[t]he narrative develops a delusional quality, reinforced by Christopher’s lack of self-awareness” (Whitaker 57), yet “in the closing chapters, to a rational perspective. Having taken us on a voyage into a mind unhinged by loss, Ishiguro seems to need to resolve the story that started us out on the journey—tying up loose ends” (57-58). Although this is what a typical detective story should do to give a neat solution to the crime, Ishiguro chooses not to follow this line of thinking.
Instead, he tends to focus on Banks’s change of mind because in such an
anti-detective narrative, strictly speaking, there is no crime about Banks’s parents and the family problem is not really solved as well. As a famous sleuth himself, Banks is paradoxically unable to totally cope with domestic problems which are at first thought of by him as relating to a crime. Banks cannot deal with his family scandal through his professional skills, mainly as a result of his emotional flaw.
However, little by little, through narrative, Banks’s unconsoled past self discloses his story of how he gradually gets over his life difficulties by waking up from his childhood fantasy. From the narrative, Banks is to emplot his experience and let himself and readers make sense of his life journey.