Summary: An untrustworthy narrator tries to excuse his failures.
Note: This post has a lot of spoilers because I am trying to grapple with how Ishiguro uses the unreliable narrator to grapple with what really happened to the protagonist and those around him. The book also has been out for over 30 years and there is a movie adaptation, so I am not particularly concerned about revealing spoilers.
I have been revisiting books that I have liked and adding more fiction this year than I normally do. My daughter is currently studying the lead up to World War 2 and I helped her work on a project reading several original documents about Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and then she had to make an argument about whether it had been the right policy or not.
It is almost impossible to put yourself in the position to really make these arguments when you are aware of the result of WWII. Personally, I lean toward pacifism, even if I am not completely pacifist. I think we should try diplomacy as much as possible prior to war. And so reading The Remains of the Day while helping my daughter with her project really does make me appreciate what Ishiguro is trying to do here. Almost no one thinks that appeasement was a good policy at this point. And at the time it was controversial.
The main positive arguments, according to the documents my daughter was assigned, was that the population of the UK was more unified going into 1940 because there was less opposition to the war because Germany had reneged on the Munich agreement and had taken land after agreeing to stop. And at the same time the UK had been ramping up their military and munitions. Those are decent arguments.
The best negative argument is that Hitler was not a reasonable negotiating partner and was never going to accept terms limiting his expansion, so any agreements made were just teaching Hitler and Germany to disregard those outside of Germany and giving Germany more time to consolidate power and build up its own munitions. Again at the time, mistrust of Hitler was high because he was not viewed as someone that was a viable negotiating partner.
I am tempted to give Mr Stephens, the main protagonist of Remains of the Day, the benefit of the doubt if he was simply trying to serve well and was unlucky enough to be employed by a lord with bad policy preferences. But the book shows all throughout that character is playing a role in how the reader should understand the unreliable narrator. Lord Darlington pursued appeasement and background negotiations, but could not himself speak difficult words to his own staff. Mr Stephens’ father was employed beyond the time when he could reasonably do the work he was assigned. But instead of directly addressing the problem, Darlington hinted at the problem. Later when Darlington asked Mr Stephens to “explain the birds and the bees” to his godson because Darlington didn’t want to. The boy’s father, who also was working on the secret conference to negotiate appeasement also was too scared to talk to his (23 year old) son who was about to be married and passed it off to Lord Darlington. Darlington then passed it off to Mr Stephens. That perfectly encapsulates how Ishiguro was framing appeasement, not just as diplomacy, but as the type of diplomacy that cowards attempt.
It is during that conference that Stephens was asked to share the “birds and the bees” and act as the planning host to about 20 people, most of whom had 2-5 staff with them, that Stephens’ father had a stroke and died. Stephens does not even go up to his father’s bedside, but keeps pouring port and caring for the guests. He tells the housekeeper (who is caring for his father) that his father would want it that way. Ishiguro is directly critiquing the very nature of “polite society” in the way he presents this flashback scene. Multiple people come up to Stephens and remark that he doesn’t look well and ask for about his welfare. There are tears on his cheeks that Stephens refused to acknowledge. And then there are others who still want to be waited on or who praise Stephens for his overwork.
I can’t help but in some ways think that the longer discussion of what it means to be a great butler, with which Ishiguro is using as the main subject of Stephens recalling these vignettes would also be a good framing of what it means to be a good pastor or a good christian. Stephens wants to claim to be in the line of greatness of the profession. And he was praised at the dinner above for “being in three places at once”, but Stephens was not at his father’s side and rejected his own humanity for the purpose of serving others. And some christians would give that same excuse for rejecting their own needs as they serve others. As I have mentioned before, there is an author who has a book I decried that calls people to submit to abuse for the purpose of others turning toward Christ. It may be that in fiction we can see the roll of the unreliable narrator can be used to reframe what it means to live our lives as christians as we should.
The next couple of chapters continue to expand on the idea of what it means to have character. Lord Halifax (the head of foreign policy during the lead up to World War II) is said by Stephens to have commented about how good the silver is polished, which makes him more comfortable in the home as Lord Darlington and Halifax again meet with other to discuss appeasing Hitler’s rise top power. (As opposed to more important things other than the superficial, which silver polishing particularly emphasizes.)
And then while Stephens expresses discomfort with it, he dismisses two maids who are Jewish because Darlington is concerned about having Jewish staff when Nazi party members or British sympathizers to come visit. Ishiguro again seems to draw on the exact idea of the problems of white moderates in Letter from a Birmingham Jail to suggest that Darlington was not personally antisemitic, but just that he wanted to not offend those who were. This gives rise to Stephens own bad behavior, which is framed as “teasing” Ms Kenton, which is the start of a longer series of events that causes her to leave the house. She is the former head housekeeper whom Stephens is driving to meet as he reflects on his life up on to that point. The “just teasing” and the “was never antisemitic” and “he always treated me with respect” framing of the book here follows the traditional path of Stephens taking no responsibility for his behavior or the behavior of his employer.
As Stephens describes his journey to meet Ms. Kenton he is sometimes thought to be a “gentleman” because of his borrowed car from the house and his nice clothes and speaking style. Some know that isn’t right because they have more experience with the gentry, and a chauffeur, and then later a doctor rightly pegs him as a butler. But in a village where he runs out of gas and a kind family takes him in, and then the rest of the village comes to introduce themselves, Stephens is happy to take on the role of “gentleman” and plays into it a bit. There is a reflection on the role of democracy and professionalism, but deeper in that discuss is dignity and claiming more for yourself than you are. And it is common for people to want others to see them as “greater than” they really are.
Later in the book Stephens and Ms Kenton meet. She is still married and while she has several times left her husband briefly, she is at that time back with her husband. She left her job as housekeeper and got married because she could not get Stephens to grapple with his own emotions and express his love for her. He loved her and she loved him. She married as an escape and describes how for years she didn’t love her husband and resented both Stephens and her husband. But over time she did come to love him and the life she has. She has children and grandchildren on the way. Her husband is about to retire and their live is good.
In the final reflection, Stephens comes to understand what he has lost in his devotion to “service.” But I also think that the unreliable narrator becomes a bit more reliable in this section, even if he isn’t entirely reliable. Stephens is grappling with his mortality and how he is aging and how he is increasingly making mistakes and can’t do everything he used to do. At the time of the reflections, Lord Darlington has passed away about 3 years earlier. As I said in my first reading, that had Stephens served a honorable Lord with better policies he would be in a different place.
But that isn’t wholly true. We can give ourselves over to “good” in ways that is still wrong. Part of what service means is embracing our humanity. This is a struggle even with mature people. Part of discernment that Ishiguro is working on in this book is that society plays a role in our giving us options. Stephens was in a life of service because his father was in a life of service. He was taught to reject his own emotions, that wasn’t solely a single choice that he made, but how he was taught to live by those around him. We do have the option to reject our upbringing and culture and choose more healthy options, but that is hard work.
The unreliable narrator in Remains of the Day can show us how to live our lives in a negative way.
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook