The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro What history is to a nation, memory is to the individual. Both serve to locate us, to tell us who we are by reminding us of what we have been and done. And both, as Kazuo Ishiguro suggests, are open to selection, repression and revision. The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro's third novel, examines the intersections of individual memory and national history through the mind of Stevens, a …showed first 75 words of 2656 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2656 total…represented to them peace, tradition, beauty and dignity" (Life in the English Country House, 300-302). However, such considerations of historical authenticity still direct attention away from the exploited servants and land tenants who enabled such houses to exist in the first place. Ishiguro writes against the entire myth of the English country house as not only a symbol of civility and benign political influence, but as a naturalized myth that regulates the authenticity of Englishness.