Everything we see of Sweet is focalized through his chauffeur-factotum, Neil Fontaine.

Tom experiences his nothingness in classic existentialist terms, feeling himself to be inchoate, a void, unresolved, unreal.

The vapid bucolia of Roxy's Avalon

what Ishiguro borrows from Kafka above all else is his oneiric geography, at once bizarre and strangely familiar.

a retort to the hoary old reactionary homily that utopia is alien to human nature

Ivan Karamazov's howl of anguish can be directed at the atheist architects of the radiant city as much as at God, since what can any revolutionary eschatology, no matter how glorious, do about the agonies of those who are long dead?

scratching away at his notebook in his idiolectic hieroglyphics

punk comes unlive with it is effectuated as an anti-authoritarian, acephalic contagion-network

fantasy's pathetically imbecilic manichean oppositions between Good and Evil, Us and (a foreign, contagious) Them are effective on the largest possible geopolitical stage.

the sentimentality it can never extirpate