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Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis:
The style of The Buried Giant is lyrical and elegant at times, with Ishiguro often using formal yet familiar language. Much of the novel’s lyricism arises in extended passages of visual description, particularly in passages meditating on the ancient and unrecognizable landscape of England. Occasionally, descriptive passages slip into a more casual style of speaking, particularly when the speaker appears to address the reader directly.
In these instances, Ishiguro eschews a literary style and replaces it with bluntness, decorating the speech of the narrator with discourse markers and direct address, as in the start of Chapter 15:
Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks [...] This aside, it is not easy to think of reasons for its standing.
Moreover, The Buried Giant features variations in style to distinguish the characters from each other through dialect: Wistan speaks in a formal style, the villagers in a less formal style, and Gawain in a stilted, declaratory style. All these manners of speaking purposely deviate from the style of the narrator, who tells this story ancient to him with a more formal and distanced language.
Related Themes:
