“The Giant, Once Well Buried, Now Stirs” : Ishiguro’s Narrative Techniques to Write The Buried Giant as a “Double-Cross Metaphor”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant (2015) has been considered a radical departure from his previous six novels in two respects: first, the use of fantastical or legendary motifs drawn from Arthurian literature or fantasy novels, and second, the use of a third-person narrator. However, previous studies have only focused on the first aspect and ignored the second one, or Ishiguro’s narrative techniques. This study explores the two experiments in The Buried Giant in order to demonstrate how they are employed by Ishiguro to address the novel’s themes, such as memories, forgetting, and traumas of an individual and a community, as well as to write the novel as a “double-cross metaphor,” which is a means to pretend “it [is] a metaphor for something else when it [is] actually the thing it actually was.” While the novel focuses on a historical fact, namely strained relations between the Britons and Saxons, Ishiguro dilutes the historical concreteness of medieval Britain with supernatural elements, which allows the novel to be read metaphorically as a fable about strife between ethnic, religious, or national communities in the contemporary world. It can also be interpreted literally as part of Britain’s long history, even though it is an alternative history of a fantastical Britain peopled by dragons. This alternative British history echoes the actual history of cross-ethnic and cross-cultural encounters in the country, which encourages Ishiguro’s readers, especially his British readers, to realize the fallacy of believing that their country had been a homogeneous entity before it was flooded by immigrants.