ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the five stories comprising Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes resist any easy generic classification that would mark it as the celebrated novelist's first published collection of short stories. To understand Ishiguro's work as a cycle, rather than a collection, challenges many of the established criteria for defining the nature of the cycle form that critics have used. The cycle especially as employed by Joyce and Ishiguro, following a circular logic rather than a progressive one, becomes the ideal vehicle through which to explore paralysis and disappointment, the very lack of movement that comes to characterize both writers' characters. The chapter concludes by looking at the endings of some of Ishiguro's stories as the key to their structural coherence, the place where epiphany is held out as a promise but ironically eludes the displaced and disillusioned characters who could so greatly benefit from its flash.
