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.”
Character Analysis
A butler of consummate skill and catastrophic self-blindness. Stevens has so completely identified with his professional role that he has no self beneath it. His narrative voice — formal, over-qualified, hedged at every turn — is both his character and his tragedy. He is not lying to us; he is telling us exactly what he believes, and what he believes is the problem. His complicity with Lord Darlington's appeasement activities, his failure to act on his feelings for Miss Kenton, his refusal to accept moral agency — all flow from the same source: the belief that a great butler does not step outside his role. By the novel's end, he acknowledges the cost of this belief but cannot change it. The armour is the man.
Hyper-formal throughout, distancing third person ('one'), avoids contractions, uses 'I would suggest' where a normal person would say 'I think.' Never uses slang or colloquial idiom.