Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day offer competing visions of consciousness and self-awareness.
In Dostoevsky's book, the mind is like a man standing between two mirrors that face each other. He stares into the long tunnel of his own faces, each of which stares back at him, each with a different expression. All while the face in the very back tells all the other faces to go to hell.
Ishiguro's vision is that of a single mirror. But here, the stretch of mirror at eye level is stained incomprehensible by old, forgotten, misplaced tears.
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