| "The Buried Giant" is the work of the British-Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro who has been sharpening his sword for ten years.When it was published in 2015,it gave rise to a tremendous response.The fiction "Buried Giant" is like an adventure story.In the historical and mythological scenes of the King Arthur era,Axl and Beatrice,a British couple,left the British village where they inhabited and embarked on a journey to find their son.Narrative,the voyage to find a child is accompanied by a search for memories of the past.Their journey to Saxon villages corresponds with the national revenge of the Saxon warrior Wistan.Individual memory is linked to national memory,to national peace,and ultimately to Querig,the mother dragon who unleashes the mist and forgets.The novel writes the historical and cultural memory between the British and Saxon people in the post-Arthurian period in a fantastic way,and deconstructs the orthodox British historical narrative and legends about King Arthur.The narrative themes of the novel range from individuals(sentiments of husband and wife)to tribes,ethnic groups and furthermore to the historical legends of the country,touching the deep-seated dilemma of mankind : love and hate,memory and forgetting,peace and war,forgiveness and revenge,individual and national issues.The question of historical trauma and how to soothe it.Although the overall narrative does not highlight gender issues,there is a strong gender connotation and unique gender awareness in the narrative level such as the overall framework,plot advancement,and narrative voice.The introduction part first illustrates the trigger for choosing the topic of this thesis,briefly introduces Kazuo Ishiguro’s creation,the research status of "The Buried Giant",and the research theory,research manners and topic selection on which the writing of this thesis is based.significance.The first chapter makes a basic exploration of the gender narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant from three aspects: the particularity of the gender setting of the characters in the fable,the functional significance and the aesthetic value of the characters.Combined with the criticism of mythological archetypes,it makes a specific analysis of the feminine image and the male image,revealing that the characters in the text not only have the original character,but also contain special historical and cultural significance.The special setting of the gender images hints Kazuo Ishiguro’s unique gender view.Compared with the feminine image,the male image in the novel is in a position of alienation and parody,which deconstructs the male-centered gender structure in the traditional historical and knight legend narrative,and eliminates the dominant position of the male image in the gender narrative.The second chapter discusses the narrative tactic of gender narrative in The Buried Giant.The novel sets up a narrative mechanism in which the female dragon releases the mist to make individuals forgetful,and the identity of the main male characters becomes confusing.Whether it is Axl or the knight Gawain,or as to amnesia or because of hiding,the narrative becomes extremely unreliable.The unreliable narration of the male narrator dispels the male narrative authority;the female character’s narration of the male narrator alters from affirmation to doubt,and the female character successfully speaks in the unreliable narration and free indirect lecture,which hides the reliability of the female voice,and gradually established the gender authority of women.The gender image metaphors and gender space metaphors in the novel are deeply rooted in Western cultural traditions and contain a clear relationship between gender and power: "Candle" is a metaphor for light and power,"Mist" is also a metaphor for male hegemony;King Arthur’s totalitarian rule and the "scapegoat" for slaughtering the Saxons;under the operation of male imperialism’s self-centered discourse hegemony,the giants are buried right to speak the underground is also obscured;only by killing the dragon and awakening the giant can we find it again.Back to the right.The perpetrator becomes the subject and involves the highest right to speak.The victim is always the object of being watched and stared at,the victim of marginalization and organization,and bears the consequences for the war waged by men.The two different meanings expressed by the characters’ behaviors and their narrative strategies in the development of the novel’s plot use the traditional gender concept in the patriarchal society to subvert the gender contrast of the hero and heroine to a certain extent,making the narrator’s reliability and an unreliability issue.It becomes more complex,and the connotation of the fable is wealthier,creating a more round and multi-faced dual character image,which has an ironic effect.The third chapter summarizes the characteristics of gender narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,and appraises from three parts.The images of Wen and others subvert the traditional male hero image,dispel the masculinity of male characters,and are ironic;they return to the worship of the earth goddess in gender narratives,and through the reproduction of the goddess worship in primitive society,they sustain humanity rationality to traditional fathers.The aesthetic connotation of the subversion of the myth of power;the reflection on the history of Britain and Europe,the dialogue between Kazuo Ishiguro’s "Buried Giant" and the previous historical studies of "King Arthur’s History" that has become texts,the history of the past and the present The creators have flexibly used male violence as a means of established historical forms to fabricate history and distorted the truth.In the historical entanglement between the Saxons and the Britons,Kazuo Ishiguro excavated historical remains,excavated the history long buried under the national mythology,demanded and deconstructed the traditional history of patriarchy.In "The Buried Giant",Kazuo Ishiguro implanted the historical grievances and realistic themes of the nation and country in the personal writing of the couple’s emotions and mother-child relationship through reflection and rewriting of the medieval history of Britain and Europe,so that he could write going out of the specific national boundaries,reaching the height of international writing,hitting the traumas theme of the individual and the nation again,and proposing to deal with the life anxiety and survival dilemma of the current period through self-reconciliation and redemption. |
