Not so Deeply Buried Hatred: Embodying the Theme of Animosity in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

Abstract

Nobel Prize-winning writer of Japanese origin Kazuo Ishiguro, who considers it his mission to discuss universal human experiences, in his fantasy novel The Buried Giant questions the ideal of English poet William Blake's Britain as a "green and pleasant island". In Ishiguro's artistic work, the natural landscapes of the English countryside are not a source of pleasure and beauty, but they mask deeply buried violence or hatred, metaphorically Giants, based on the title of the novel. Ishiguro contrasts the picturesque nature of England with the soil, which holds the signs of massacre - bones and corpses. The writer goes even further and relates characters to the deceptive landscape of England, who after winning our sympathy through their noble behavior, reveal past mistakes and atrocities. The presented paper examines the embodiment of the theme of hatred in the novel, which develops on two levels - personal/narrow and general/broad. On the one hand, on the example of the old British couple Axl and Beatrice, as well as the Saxon fighter Wistan, the writer shows the hatred buried in the human heart. On the other hand, against the backdrop of the life tragedies of the main characters, the bloody past of the Britons and Saxons is vividly described. The novel contains an unsolvable riddle for humanity - how to deal with the past, especially the extremes of conflict, namely, cases of massacres? Ishiguro's answer is not very promising.