REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE BURIED GIANT

The fictions of Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro revolve around memory, loss, love, guilt, suffering and war. Ishiguro visits the past in all of his novels. There is no doubt that he is fascinated by the idea of memory. The issue of memory is in the forefront of The Buried Giant, which he wrote after a 10-year hiatus. The Buried Giant is the story of an old couple Axl and Beatrice travel to the village where their son lives. Because of the mist that has caused a mysterious, infectious forgetfulness that affects everyone in their community, they even have difficulty remembering their son. They live in a place where forgetting is normal and remembering is very difficult. In the end, they start to remember again, and their lives take a different path. The main theme of the novel is the question of whether peace and serenity can be disrupted by the bad memories that have been left in the dark if a society forgets all things about its past and starts to remember it again. The aim of this study is to examine how Kazuo Ishiguro in his fantasy novel, The Buried Giant, handles forgetting, remembrance, individual and collective memory with the help of theoretical studies.

Keywords

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, memory, collective memory, forgetting, remembering.