Free Association and Empathy in Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant : A Case for Postcritical Psychoanalysis

Abstract: Through a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , this essay makes the case for a postcritical psychoanalysis, synthesizing two interpretive approaches that scholars often pit against one another. The first part of the essay reviews postcritical and surface reading, picking up moments in which they unexpectedly resonate with psychoanalytic object relations. In a postcritical psychoanalytic spirit, Facundo then revises the definition of empathy from imagining oneself in the shoes of another to an irresolvable tension between sameness and difference. Finally, an analysis of The Buried Giant shows how this understanding of empathy plays out among the characters and reader.