THE QUASI-LEGEND OF KING ARTHUR BURIED UNDER CORRUPTED LANDS: HISTORICIZATION OF ARTHURIAN LEGEND IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE BURIED GIANT

Kazuo Ishiguro (1954), the Nobel Laureate author, setting his novel The Buried Giant in Arthurian Britain, thoroughly analyzed prominent points of memory, trauma, forgetfulness, and chivalric code by way of narrating the interesting detours of Axl and Beatrice in a story of loss, death, regret, and love. In a strange forgetfulness, which causes villagers to forget their distant and recent past, the buried story about Arthurian chivalry manifests itself on every page by raising questions on the concepts of loyalty, honour, and courage. Ishiguro tells the story of the old couple, Axl and Beatrice, who perseveringly want to find their son, crumbs of information about who would bring out the painful consequences of having an illegitimate baby. He also rewrites the Arthurian legend from a contemporary perspective by making use of elements related to the concepts of memory and trauma.

The aim of this study is to analyze the concepts of loss, death, memory, trauma, remembering, and forgetting under the basic points of postmodern narrative strategies such as historiographic metafiction to show the determinant factors on the historicization of King Arthur in an evolutionary story of Kazuo Ishiguro in a 21st-century perspective.

Keywords: Kazuo Ishiguro, Buried Giant, Historiographic Metafiction, Memory, Trauma, King Arthur