Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Ishiguro, Kazuo (Vol. 110) - Bert Cardullo (essay date Winter 1995)

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Bert Cardullo (essay date Winter 1995)

SOURCE: Bert Cardullo, "The Servant," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XLVII, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 616-22.

[In the following essay Cardullo compares the movie version of The Remains of the Day with the novel.]

Milan Kundera once made a helpful distinction between two sorts of novels set in the past. There is, on the one hand, "the novel that is the illustration of a historical situation … popularizations that translate non-novelistic knowledge into the language of the novel," and on the other hand the novel that examines "the historical dimension of human existence." In the first case, cardboard cutouts are wheeled out to represent "the bourgeoisie" or "the last throes of imperialism"—in other words, important social tendencies in the historical scheme of things rather than individualized or self-determined human beings. Here, the background effectively replaces the foreground. In the second...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Kazuo Ishiguro with Gregory Mason (interview date 8 December 1986)
   2. Merle Rubin (review date 30 November 1989)
   3. Gabriele Annan (review date 7 December 1989)
   4. Hermione Lee (review date 22 January 1990)
   5. Kazuo Ishiguro with Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger (interview date 2 April 1990)
   6. Cynthia F. Wong (essay date Winter 1995)
   7. Bert Cardullo (essay date Winter 1995)
   8. Roz Kaveney (review date 12 May 1995)
   9. Merle Rubin (review date 4 October 1995)
   10. Richard Eder (review date 8 October 1995)
   11. Brooke Allen (review date 11 October 1995)
   12. Charlotte Innes (review date 6 November 1995)
   13. Stanley Kauffmann (review date 6 November 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright