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.”
Language Register
Hyper-formal first person — passive constructions, continuous hedging, elaborate qualification, Latinate vocabulary deployed as emotional shield
Syntax Profile
Extremely long, heavily subordinated sentences. Multiple embedded clauses, each qualified by the next. Stevens's average sentence is 35+ words. Passive voice used systematically at emotional peaks — 'it occurred to me that,' 'I was struck by,' 'it was conveyed to me.' Active constructions appear mainly in narrating others' behavior. Stevens removes himself grammatically from his own most important moments. He is the subject of almost no sentences that contain feeling.
Figurative Language
Low — Stevens is suspicious of figurative language, which requires committing to a comparison. His prose is literal and managerial. The few metaphors are drawn from domestic service (the 'polished' surface, the 'smooth running,' the 'well-maintained household'). Ishiguro uses the formal prose as a container: the gap between the flat register and the emotional content it restrains IS the novel's dominant figure.
Era-Specific Language
Formal address for a lord; Stevens uses it even when speaking about Lord Darlington in private retrospect, maintaining the professional distance to the end
Stevens's way of referring to his own identity — never 'my dignity,' always the distancing 'one's'
Stevens's constant hedge before any opinion — he 'ventures' rather than states, seeking permission from himself to have a view
Performative deference inserted before the mildest observations; Stevens asks permission of his own inner audience
Stevens's way of opening on painful memories — he places himself outside the past before entering it
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Stevens
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.
Professional identity has fully replaced personal identity. The class performance is the man — there is nothing beneath it.
Miss Kenton
Formal but warmer — she will address Stevens directly, use his name, express opinions without hedging. Her language has a directness his lacks.
She occupies the same professional world but has not allowed it to consume her self. The contrast reveals what Stevens has sacrificed.
Lord Darlington
Old-school English gentleman — courteous, circumspect, given to understatement. 'I wonder if you might...' masks absolute authority.
Upper-class English understatement is the cultural system that produces Stevens's personality. The butler is the refinement of the aristocrat's own code.
Mr. Farraday
Casual American — uses contractions, jokes, teases, expects informal responses. His banter is genuine ease; Stevens experiences it as a foreign language.
Farraday's naturalness makes Stevens's performance visible as performance. The American democratism is a structural challenge to Stevens's entire world.
Narrator's Voice
Stevens is one of the most precisely constructed unreliable narrators in literature — but his unreliability is not lies. He tells the truth; he simply cannot interpret it. He reports feeling 'something powerful' in the moment Kenton announces her engagement, but cannot name it love. He says his father's death was 'trivial' by the standards of the conference, then says 'I recall I did not feel any great emotion.' He is not hiding from us — he is hiding from himself, and Ishiguro's genius is to make the gap between narration and meaning legible to the reader while invisible to the narrator.
Tone Progression
Prologue and Day One
Self-satisfied, formal, complacent
Stevens believes in himself and his choices. The hedging is a verbal habit, not yet painful.
Days Two and Three
Proud, then subtly uneasy
The father sections introduce a dissonance Stevens cannot quite resolve. He is 'proud' but the memories don't sit still.
Days Four and Five
Defensive, increasingly retrospective
The Jewish maids, the appeasement conferences, the evening scenes with Miss Kenton. The formal voice is working harder.
Day Six
Quietly devastated, then stoic
The reunion and the seafront. The voice briefly cracks, then reconstructs itself. The ending is resolution, not redemption.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Proust — memory as unreliable reconstruction, the narrator's relationship with his own past as the real subject
- Henry James — the unsaid as the most important thing; long sentences doing the work of suppression
- Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby — another unreliable narrator who protests objectivity while revealing self-interest, but where Nick judges others too freely, Stevens cannot judge himself at all
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions