Pragmatic Inference Breakdown: A Relevance-Theoretic Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Abstract

This research uses Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory to analyze the cognitive-pragmatic processes underlying the readerly disorientation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. Despite existing research on the novel from thematic, cognitive-narratological, and phenomenological perspectives, the communicative processes underlying the novel's interpretive difficulties remain relatively unexplored. Using a qualitative, scene-by-scene analysis, this research shows how the failure of mutual manifestness, the buildup of pragmatic noise, and the ongoing preference for weak implicatures over explicatures contribute to the disruption of relevance optimization in the narrative. These processes lead to what this research calls inferential overload, a situation in which relevance behavior is constantly triggered while convergence on inference is systematically blocked. The results show that inferential overload is a narrative strategy in its own right, rather than a consequence of ambiguity or indeterminacy, and that it correlates the reader’s interpretive experience with the protagonist’s psychological disorientation. This research contributes to the application of Relevance Theory to literary discourse by taking into account the narratively productive communicative failure.