Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most prominent contemporary British writers and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Buried Giant set on the Arthurian British Isles where the conflicts between Britons and Saxons came to a cessation, is his historical fantasy novel published in 2015. It is constructed around the conflicts between Britons and Saxons, demonstrating their lasting traumatic influence on individuals from both sides. This novel provides readers with a profound insight into the characters’ innermost traumatic feelings which not only plague them but also are universal to mankind. Therefore, the novel featuring unreliable narrative is suitable for trauma studies and this paper mainly focusing on the two main characters, Axl and Sir Gawain, aims to conduct a comparative analysis to illustrate the similarities and differences of traumas experienced by them and their ways to tackle traumas and the results so as to explain that it is essential to expose and confront one’s traumas in the process of recovering from them.
Shaoyi Guan (Wed,) studied this question.