The ethics of memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

This study aims to examine Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (2015) in the light of the ethics of memory which has become a significant matter of debate especially after the disastrous crimes of the twentieth century. While traumatic memories constitute the subject matter, how individuals and societies need to remember the past or whether they are obliged to remember the past to comprehend sufferings of the earlier generations have appeared as important questions that are related to the field of the ethics of memory. In the novel, Ishiguro depicts a world of oblivion where all the atrocities of the past are erased by a forgetting mist which covers personal and collective past of individuals and communities. Set in aftermath of a genocide in post-Arthurian Britain, the novel paves the way for analysing the loss of memory and the struggle to remember the past from the perspective of the ethics of memory. In this sense, by analysing Ishiguro's The Buried Giant –which deals with the nature of remembering and forgetting– in terms of its relation to the ethics of memory, this study reveals the novel presents that remembering the past without feeling hatred and revenge after a process of confrontation/carefrontation is the moral way of memory making and memory work.