Failing to Bury the Giant: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Violence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Seventh Novel

Abstract

If The Buried Giant had been intended as a historiographic metafiction, its setting could have been replaced with recent locations having witnessed great wars, but then Kazuo Ishiguro would have unwillingly written a reportage-like novel instead of a historical fantasy dealing with magical ways of forgetting past atrocities in order to secure a peaceful future. While in his previous novels Ishiguro introduces only mental monsters, in The Buried Giant the characters are sent searching for their forgotten past in a post-Arthurian England with ogres that carry off children, pixies that render people ill and dragons that can erase all memories. The current study proposes an interdisciplinary analysis of The Buried Giant, drawing upon psychology, game theory and behavioural economics in order to convey personal and collective violence in connection to power, racism, trauma and spatio-temporal mobility. In the end, all events stem from choices and decisions, which are essentially emotional.