The Buried Giant, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go

Memory is fundamental to Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction. The present paper analyses how the past makes its way into the present in The Buried Giant, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. To different degrees, all three novels address the issue of personal identity as reliant on a larger context. Personal stories are written against the wider historical background that the characters are part of. Eventual failure, loss or even death are significant from a postmodern view on history and time, namely, that there is no grand historical narrative that is credible, reliable or that can act as the center to which characters can return and make sense of their personal stories.