| Summary: | Behavioural research indicates that humans can seldom be rational decision-makers that maximise their profits while minimising their costs at all times. The current paper proposes an interdisciplinary perspective on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels with regard to his characters’ choices, decisions and actions. By presenting identity crises as a result of faulty choices and decisions, Ishiguro stresses the importance of heuristics, biases and conditioning in the decision-making process. Like real people, Ishigurian characters are emotional, irrational and prone to error, behaving contrary to the maximisation of their lives. This behavioural pattern comes as everyday normality in both real and fictional environments plagued by uncertainty and unable to provide all the available information on every topic – not even in an unnamed modern city (The Unconsoled) or a dystopian England in the late 1990s (Never Let Me Go), let alone in a post-Arthurian England dominated by magic (The Buried Giant) or during and after the Second World War (A Pale View of Hills; An Artist of the Floating World; The Remains of the Day; When We Were Orphans). As a case study from literature, Ishiguro’s characters prove that the decision-making process cannot be viewed unilaterally, hence the interdisciplinary nature of the current study.
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