Ethnic War and the Collective Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Abstract

ABSTRACT Collective memory, especially the memory of war, is of critical importance to the cohesion of an ethnic group. This paper takes an interest in the collective memory of ethnic war in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. It firstly examines the influence of the loss and recall of collective war memory, which impacts the (re)shaping of group identity. It then introduces the idea of “symbolic politics”, and illustrates that the stories in the novel and their real-world parallels suggest that the manipulative elites could consolidate particular collective war memories for their own interests or the needs of the present. Collective war memory could be constructed to build ethnic myths which could evoke emotions like hatred and fear. However, neither the deliberate suppressing/forgetting of the traumatic memory of war, nor the sudden remembering/emphasising of fear and crisis are the way to coexist in harmony with others. It concludes that some key factors of forgiveness emphasised in the novel might help with peacebuilding in the postwar world and finally complete the process of reconciliation.