This paper calls for an alternative view of educational policy, a departure from the macroperspective currently dominating policy analysis. The latter perspective tends to focus on policy development and implementation issues of politics and control, compliance and measurement, and relationship structures and influences among groups and actors. Shifting to a microperspective can help conceptualize the meaning of policy while focusing on the individual educators who must change through the policy-enactment process. A microperspective examines individuals' ideologies of thought, motives to act, and limitations to change with respect to "personal" and social policy. Imaginative literature offers a way to break free from policy-analysis frameworks that tend to reinforce current patterns of top-down policy-making. Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day" illustrates the potential of literature for suggesting new ways of thinking about educational policy. This novel contains themes that parallel educational policy-realization, even though the story is well removed in context, time, and space from the educational system. Contains 25 references. (Author/MLH)