The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
“A perfect butler looks back on a perfect life — and discovers, one careful sentence at a time, that he wasted it.”
At a Glance
Stevens, a reserved English butler, takes a rare motoring trip through the West Country in the mid-1950s, ostensibly to recruit a former housekeeper named Miss Kenton back to Darlington Hall. Over six days of driving and reminiscing, he reconstructs his decades of service under Lord Darlington — a well-meaning aristocrat who was manipulated into supporting the Nazis — and gradually, painfully, admits to himself that his rigid devotion to duty cost him both love and moral judgment. By the end, he understands he has squandered everything that mattered, and must find meaning in whatever time remains.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Winner of the 1989 Booker Prize. Considered by many critics the finest British novel of the twentieth century's second half. The Nobel Committee cited it specifically when awarding Ishiguro the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature — 'a writer who, in novels of great emotional intensity, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.' The novel invented a new mode of literary suppression: using a formal, controlled narrative voice as the primary vehicle of emotional devastation.
Diction Profile
Hyper-formal first person — passive constructions, continuous hedging, elaborate qualification, Latinate vocabulary deployed as emotional shield
Low