Voices From Historical Fragments

Kazuo Ishiguro is considered as one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world.In 2017,the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize for Literature.The Buried Giant,published in 2015,recalls the bruising historical period of Briton-Saxon war from the perspective of memory and forgetfulness.The history of the war written by Ishiguro deviates from what traditional historians write but coincides with New Historicists' philosophies.This thesis is composed of three chapters.The first chapter talks about “textuality of history” and the subjective dimension of history.Sir Gawain,spokesman for the ruling class and Wistan,representative of the marginalized group both recall the war between Britons and Saxons for their own benefits by avoiding mentioning brutal violence committed by their people.It confirms one of the viewpoints of Kazuo Ishiguro that stories of the past inevitably conclude personal selections and preferences.And narrators intentionally bury certain fragments of history to artificially construct a seemingly reasonable history.Chapter two demonstrates Ishiguro's historical view that “History” should be replaced by “histories”.He explores the voices and stories of the ordinary people in history focusing on individual struggles to deconstruct the grand narrative.Kazuo Ishiguro breaks up the logical relations established by narrators among historical events by adding overlooked historical fragments when narrating mainstream history.And he opposes the traditional perception that history is chronological and progressive through shifting points of view and shifting between past and present stories.The focus of chapter three is analyzing the novel from the perspective of intertextuality.The Buried Giant is full of echoes of classic literary works such as Divine Comedy,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.Through intertextuality,readers will have a more exact understanding of Kazuo Ishiguro's reflections on love and resentment,life and death,war,and peace.Furthermore,Kazuo Ishiguro deliberately chooses the protagonists Beatrice and Gawain from Divine Comedy and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as two common characters in The Buried Giant.Their stories,recorded in mainstream history in previous literary works,become the overlooked and marginalized historical fragments in The Buried Giant.Ishiguro expresses that marginalized historical fragments and the mainstream history could be transformed mutually,which shows concerns of historical fragments again.This thesis attempts to interpret Kazuo Ishiguro's views of history from the perspective of New Historicism.He believes that it is impossible to have access to the full lived authentic past,and that storytellers reconstruct what happened in the past by their ideological bents.However,the grief and mistakes buried in history cannot be erased by political power or self-deception.Narrators and storytellers should not only pay close attention to the great personage and grand events but also focus on ‘petits récits'(little stories)and localized perspectives.Kazuo Ishiguro believes that no matter how much storytellers focus on grand historical narratives of war and heroic acts;they cannot avoid the heavy torture of war inflicted on millions of people.The battlefield is not the playground for big shots,but the concentration camp for the ordinary.