Interior Landscapes: An Ecocritical Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant

Given the ecocritical potential of many of Ishiguro’s novels, more ecocritical analyses should be carried out on his works. This paper aims to read The Buried Giant (2015) through an ecocritical lens and show how the setting of the novel exemplifies and adds new aspects to ecocritical concepts, such as the disappearance of the landscape, the undermining of anthropocentrism and the silence of nature. The first section will focus on the concept of the ‘embodied landscape’ and will be concerned with ways in which landscape undercuts notions of man’s superiority through the memories of past events it is able to retain, unlike the characters, who are utterly deprived of their memory. The second section will examine the symbolism of trees and greenery so as to show how they seem to be linked to memories and contribute to filtering them, thus letting some memories re-emerge from the collective forgetfulness.