Narrative Voice and Unreliable Narration in Kole Omotoso’s Just Before Dawn and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Unreliable narration as a literary technique raises fundamental questions about the relationship between memory, self-deception, and historical truth, and a comparison of Kole Omotoso's Just Before Dawn and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day illuminates how two very different literary traditions use the limited perspective of a first-person narrator to explore the psychology of historical complicity and political denial. This study examined how both narrators construct retrospective accounts of their lives that are systematically undermined by the evidence they themselves provide, and how this formal strategy is used to explore collaboration with oppressive political systems. A narratological methodology drawing on Wayne Booth's concept of the implied author and Dorrit Cohn's theory of transparent minds was applied. Omotoso's unnamed narrator reflects on Nigeria's history of political violence and personal compromise, while Ishiguro's Stevens meditates on his life of service to a fascist sympathiser. Both texts use the retrospective narrator's self-justifying account to expose the mechanisms of self-deception that enable complicity with political evil. The analysis showed that both texts share a formal investment in the gap between what narrators claim and what their narratives reveal, but employ this gap in different cultural registers. The study recommends this pairing for narrative theory courses in Comparative Literature programmes at Nigerian universities, particularly those at institutions in the South West zone where Omotoso's Yoruba cultural context resonates.

Keywords: unreliable narration, narrative voice, Omotoso, Ishiguro, political complicity