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The Remains of the Day, in detail
Kazuo Ishiguro's 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel is narrated by Stevens, an aging English butler who has devoted his life to Darlington Hall — and to his employer, Lord Darlington, who turned out to have fascist sympathies in the 1930s. The novel takes the form of Stevens's account of a motoring holiday through the English countryside in 1956, in which he visits Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper with whom he worked for two decades and with whom he may — he is not sure — have been in love.
The novel's central formal achievement is that Stevens is one of the great unreliable narrators in modern fiction, but his unreliability is not evasion or lying — it's a genuine inability to access his own emotional life. He has constructed himself as an instrument of professional service, and the self that could have loved Miss Kenton, or acknowledged complicity in Lord Darlington's politics, has been so thoroughly suppressed that he cannot quite reach it even in retrospect. The gaps between what Stevens says and what the novel's events make clear are the spaces where the real story lives.
Ishiguro is interested in how institutions — and ideologies of duty — can function as shelter from the self. Stevens's "dignity" is a kind of armor, and the novel asks what was sacrificed to maintain it. Lord Darlington was not a villain, the novel insists; he was a decent man who made catastrophic errors in good faith. Stevens served him faithfully through those errors. The question of complicity — whether good faith and professional loyalty excuse the butler's knowing participation — runs under the surface of every conversation.
The prose is impeccably controlled: formal, slightly stiff, full of qualifications and self-corrections that enact Stevens's personality on the sentence level. For some readers this creates enormous tension; for others it creates distance. The novel is short enough that its method is always in proportion to its subject. The final scene, on the pier at Weymouth, is among the most quietly devastating endings in post-war English fiction.
The big ideas
- 1.
Stevens narrates his own story in a way that consistently obscures its most important emotional content — the gap between his account and what actually happened is the novel's central drama.
- 2.
The ideology of 'professional dignity' is shown to be both genuinely admirable and a mechanism for avoiding responsibility — Stevens used his vocation to avoid his life.
- 3.
Lord Darlington's trajectory from decent man to Nazi sympathizer is a case study in how good intentions and class deference can produce moral catastrophe.
