The Buried Giant Discussion Guide: Home
Kazuo Ishiguro
Photo courtesy of Faber & Faber.
His biography is available at Biography in Context. (Sign in with library card number to access).
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
- Scott Rudin Nabs Hot New Book ‘The Buried Giant’ By Kazuo IshiguroDeadline, March 4, 2015
- The Persistence — And Impermanence — Of Memory In 'The Buried Giant'NPR Books, February 28, 2015
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, February 25, 2015
- For Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘The Buried Giant’ Is a DepartureThe New York Times, February 19, 2015
- The Test of Time Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels of rememberingHarper's Magazine, April 2015
Other Books by Kazuo Ishiguro
Nocturnes by ISBN: 9780307271020One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.
Never Let Me Go by ISBN: 9781400043392A novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child Kathy, now thirty-one years old, lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
When We Were Orphans by ISBN: 9780375724404Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
The Remains of the Day by ISBN: 9780394573434A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England.
An Artist of the Floating World by ISBN: 9780679722663In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"--the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink--offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
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Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the idea of the hero’s quest as perpetuated in pop culture. How does Ishiguro’s story conform to the standards of this literary trope? How does it defy it?
2. The mist that permeates Axl and Beatrice’s world creates societies wherein historical and personal memory is limited. Discuss the significance of the mist throughout the novel. How does it invite fear? When is it comforting? What allegories can you draw from it?
3. In Chapter Two, Axl and Beatrice have an uncomfortable encounter with a boatman and an old woman. Discuss the significance of this interaction. How did you interpret the woman’s odd—and brutal—behavior? How does this meeting with the boatman echo throughout the novel?
4. When Beatrice and Axl visit the Saxon village, Ivor apologizes for the fact that his community set on them like “crazed wolves” (59). At what other points in the novel is human behavior described as animalistic?
5. How does Edwin’s memory of his mother change throughout the novel? Discuss the incident in which he is stuck in the barn in Chapter Four. How does his mother’s voice act as a protective force? How much of his recollection of his mother do you think is accurate, and how much is fabricated?
6. Discuss the themes of trust and deception throughout The Buried Giant. How does the mist cause distrust between people? At what points do we see doubt creep into Axl and Beatrice’s relationship? Their relationships with other characters?
7. Discuss Edwin’s relationship with Wistan. Why do you think Wistan took Edwin under his wing?
8. Several characters are described as “warriors” in The Buried Giant. What values or traits are intrinsic to this label? How does honor factor into a warrior’s conduct?
9. In Chapter Seven, Gawain leads Beatrice, Axl, and Edwin through an underground tunnel from the monastery that they had believed to be a place of refuge. Why do you think each character see different things—bats, dead infants—during their trek? Do you think the brutality described in this scene is imagined?
10. On page 86, Edwin is described as a “mule.” Discuss the significance of this characterization, and how it echoes throughout the novel.
11. In Chapter Eleven, Beatrice and Axl have a horrifying experience while trying to ford a river. Discuss this scene, and the grotesque descriptions within it. What is the significance of Axl’s interaction with the woman on the boat? Why do you think Beatrice’s memory is so greatly affected during this scene? What does this part of their journey reveal about their relationship?
12. Part III of the novel opens with Gawain’s First Reverie. Describe the contents of this section. Why do you think Ishiguro chose to write this section in such an intimate perspective?
13. Discuss the duel between Wistan and Gawain in Chapter Fifteen. Do you believe they respect each other, despite their opposing loyalties? How did you interpret Wistan’s emotional state after slaying both Gawain and Querig?
14. Axl and Beatrice’s relationship is marked by tenderness and mutual affection throughout the novel. Were you surprised, then, by the revelation of Beatrice’s unfaithfulness? How did you interpret their final interactions in the last chapter of the novel?
15. Why do you think Ishiguro chose to have the final chapter of the book come from the perspective of the boatman?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Reserve or Borrow a Copy
The Buried Giant by ISBN: 9780307271037Publication Date: 2015-03-03The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards--some strange and otherworldly--but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight--each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories. Sometimes savage, sometimes mysterious, always intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory, a resonant tale of love, vengeance, and war.
Recommended Reading
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by ISBN: 9780062255655A moving story of memory, magic, and survival Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy. Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie--magical, comforting, wise beyond her years--promised to protect him, no matter what.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by ISBN: 9780812998917In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor's office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining. Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world. Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia's children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights--or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.
