‘The Remains of the Day’: A Meditation on Duty, Dignity and Regret

A review of ‘The Remains of the Day’, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Faber and Faber, 1989.

Stevens is a butler, living in England after the Second World War. At the start of the story, he is setting off on a road trip. And what begins as a visit to an old housekeeper becomes a journey of a quite different kind, a survey of the past. On the drive, he reflects on his loyalty to a former employer and a love he never pursued. Soon he is lost in these memories.

So there are two timelines, but the bulk of the story takes place in the past. Stevens recounts his years of service to Lord Darlington, a man later disgraced for his Nazi sympathies. His narration is clinical, meticulous, reflective of his self-control and fastidious approach to work. He recalls events and meetings with detached professionalism. Yet cracks begin to show beneath this reticent veneer. We begin to perceive a man burdened by the weight of his choices. At the heart of his worldview, repeated like a drumbeat, is the notion of ‘dignity’; but as the tale unfolds it becomes plain that this notion, this ideal, has cost Stevens happiness and connection.

We begin to perceive a man burdened by the weight of his choices.

The novel is chiefly about repression. Stevens is so devoted to his job that he is equally blind to the moral failings of his employer and the love of Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. In one scene, she stands at the door, yearning for his company. But he dismisses her, retreating behind the mask of propriety. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you are referring to, Miss Kenton,’ he says, perfectly polite but distant. These small exchanges are charged with evocations of the life he might have had, had he dared to open up, to reach out.

But The Remains of the Day is also a fine imaginative critique of obedience, particularly the way the virtue of duty can shade into the vice of passivity. Stevens draws self-respect from what he perceives to be his professionalism and dutifulness to his employer. But as he does so, he refrains from doing what is right. He allows his employer, who is more naïve than bad, to trash his name by engaging with Nazis and promoting appeasement. Darlington’s actions spring from poor judgement and a failure, rooted in his class, to understand the moral consequences of his actions.

Ishiguro’s prose holds up a mirror to Stevens’s character: restrained, formal, quietly devastating. The writing is exquisitely controlled; consequently moments of emotional release are seismic in their intensity. The interweaving of presence and past throw light on the importance of the future, of looking ahead; for if Stevens had looked ahead, the fortunes of Darlington, Miss Kenton and himself might have been different, might have better. Meanwhile, the beauty of the countryside through which he drives stands in stark contrast to his inner emptiness. He has been made hollow by putting duty, narrowly conceived, and dignity above conscience and love.

The interweaving of presence and past throw light on the importance of the future, of looking ahead.

Stevens’s story, which, with its study of dignity, duty, rank and reserve, seems profoundly English, has far wider resonance. For it is also a study of the wrong thing, the bad choice, the opportunity missed, the moment wasted. It is a warning against appeasement: the placation of the one who lets you down or—equally—the one who lets himself down, the one we ought to help before he makes a mess of things. There is a time to pick our battles; but there is also a time to have them. There is a time to stand back, and a time to fight. There is a time to speak up. There is a time to cast aside what will not matter in the end for what will—as when Sean in Good Will Hunting misses the baseball game to spend time with the woman who becomes his wife.

The task facing even an author with Ishiguro’s gifts is to make a narrator who disdains to show his feelings interesting. He lets Stevens’s own words betray him, allowing his pain to emerge through the cracks in the shell he tries so hard to keep intact. Like a statue of Michelangelo, he is a picture of contained force, full of pain that wants to be expressed. The brilliance of the novel lies in its ability to elicit the emotions Stevens himself will not—or cannot—express. This is a very moving book, unassuming on its face yet profound. Ishiguro asks us to consider our values, our own choices, our own regrets, and, in the light of these, how we might make the most of what remains of the day.