Radical Acceptance of a Story's Unfolding: On Point of View and Structure in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

In case you don’t know me, let me introduce myself via anecdote: I am fairly staunchly anti-tech. I mean. No. Let me qualify. I enjoy certain tech that I find truly helpful, like the MapMyRun and Merlin apps on my iPhone (I am an outdoor walker, runner, and a birder). At the same time, I sorta hate my iPhone, and feel particular applications like Instagram, Facebook, and even Substack pulling me away from my embodied self. As a sensitive, this disconnect, this disembodiment, feels icky. Unnatural. Something to be avoided. So how do I come about choosing the books I read and review? Not by algorithm. Not because Goodreads or Instagram or Amazon recommend them. In the case of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, I woke up one morning with the intention of finding a copy of Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator and Other Stories at a local bookseller so that I would not need to purchase it from Amazon and line the coffers of Jeff Bezos. I drove out to South Main Book Company in Salisbury with this express intention—regrettably, they did not have Dahl’s collection. Instead, I perused the shelves in the literature section for anything that looked interesting. The Remains of the Day had a stamp on the front cover: “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Beneath that, “Winner of the Booker Prize.” It was published recently, in 1988, and its author is still alive! I love reading living authors! So I bought it. No algorithm. No tech. Just two eyes, a brain, and some books on a shelf. This was the best decision I’ve made in at least a week. Even as I write this, I am smiling to myself.

The Remains of the Day is the story of a butler named Mr Stevens, who must navigate post-World War II changes in society and culture, changes that become particularly acute after Stevens’ esteemed Lord Darlington passes away and Darlington Hall—along with its head butler—is bought by a wealthy American, Mr Farraday. The story follows the winding trajectory of Mr Stevens’ holiday, during which he embarks upon a road trip to Weymouth to visit (and potentially re-employ) former head housemaid, Miss Kenton. The story is about love, dignity, politics, the things we cannot say, and radical acceptance of life’s unfolding.

On the book’s back cover, Ann Beattie writes, “A perfect novel. I couldn’t put it down.” I am not too familiar with Ann Beattie (maybe I should become familiar with her), but I agree. Perhaps because of my sensitivity, I found this novel’s nuance and quiet development calming in this noisy world. There are no loud flash-bangs. There’s nothing explosive, and excepting the slow reveal of Lord Darlington’s misguided engagement with Nazis, there is no high-strung action nor overwrought dramatics. Yet in its quiet march forward, the tale covers remarkable ground. My favorite aspects of the story are the point of view and structure—craft elements I’d like to explore in detail.

First, Ishiguro chose for this tale the first-person in present tense, which is already fascinating as it is unlikely there are/were that many head butlers to great Lords’ estates in England—ever. Mr Stevens himself alludes to this being a small circle, and although he is fictional, I believe him. So this first-person perspective is unique. And unexpected! We have numerous literary tales of English manors and estates throughout, especially, the Regency and Victorian Eras, but the ones I can think of are written either third person and/or from the estate owners’ perspective, not from the perspective of the help. Think Austen and the Brontës here, as specific examples. Of course, there are more recent stories from the perspective of the help in the US, but I can think of no others off the top of my head from Britain.

What delighted me about the first-person perspective was the protagonist head butler, Stevens’, frequent breaking of the fourth wall and direct address of the reader, implying that the reader might be a younger butler Stevens would be mentoring. Here’s one textual clue:

One is simply accepting an inescapable truth: that the likes of you and I will never be in a position to comprehend the great affairs of today’s world, and our best course will always be to put our trust in an employer we judge to be wise and honourable, and to devote our energies to the task of serving him to the best of our ability. (201)

Of course, neither Ishiguro nor Stevens know me, and this claim absolutely does not apply to me—I actually scribbled, “You don’t know me!” in the margin here; therefore, we must imagine Stevens’ audience as someone he is recommending to “put [their] trust in an employer” and “serving him to the best of [their] ability.” If it were possible Stevens had a son, I’d guess that was his audience. However, to this point in the story, Stevens mentions no romantic ties and is not married, and indeed Miss Kenton suggests, “…I’ve noticed it, Mr Stevens. You do not like pretty girls to be on your staff. Might it be that our Mr Stevens fears distraction? Can it be that our Mr Stevens is flesh and blood after all and cannot fully trust himself?” (156). So my best guess is Stevens has a mentee in mind as his audience. Kinda cute, right?

Another thing Ishiguro accomplishes via first-person is a profound, almost obsessive-compulsive interiority that feels natural and characteristic of a stuffy old butler. His narrative is peppered with statements like, “I feel I should perhaps return a moment to the question of…” (145). Stevens thinks and re-thinks and re-re-thinks (okay he overthinks) things like the time he stood outside Miss Kenton’s parlour door knowing she was inside crying. He inspects at least thrice: when did that happen—what were the circumstances—what was his expected role in that moment? And over the course of the story, he reads and re-reads and re-re-reads Miss Kenton’s letter, finding in it each time a different meaning. I found this compulsive habit endearing and felt that Ishiguro did an excellent job of stepping into his protagonist’s head to view the world from his perspective.

Finally, I found it fun that in his overthinking of everything, Stevens even overthinks how he’s telling his story throughout via metacommentary. For example, in overexplaining the way his father’s generation of butlers felt about “dignity” versus his generation, our protagonist writes, “I believe I can best highlight the difference between the generations by expressing myself figuratively,” and “Perhaps I might explain this further” (114-115). Stevens is never quite satisfied that he has communicated effectively, he fears being misunderstood, and so he reevaluates his approach over and over, writing quite explicitly about how he is writing. People use metacommentary, most often, when engaging with another individual directly—either in oral conversation or correspondence. It’s not something I’ve seen much, if at all, in a novel.

Another craft choice that interested me was the novel’s chronology/structure. As I said, the story is told in the present tense, and for the most part, that is true. The present tense is a framework in the story. In the present, Stevens is “motoring” in Mr Farraday’s Ford from Darlington Hall to Weymouth. In the present, Stevens stops to write, either epistemologically or in a journal, to tell the reader where he is on his journey. At one moment, he is writing in the room where’s he’s boarding in a hotel; the next moment, he is writing from the dining hall of the Rose Garden Hotel in Little Compton. In his writings, he recounts the events of each day’s worth of travel (in recent past tense), interspersed with lengthy flashbacks to his time serving Lord Darlington alongside Miss Kenton (in distant past tense). Interestingly, absolutely none of the action dictated takes place in the present. Stevens always stops to write. This is structurally different from most contemporary literary fiction, where the action takes place in the present tense. It is a step further away from that immediacy. This has a calming effect.

So…although this story’s immediate plot takes place in the present, the bulk of the book is recounting events of the past through memory. And guess what my friends! That is precisely the structure of my own most recent novella—about which I was so concerned even just earlier this month as I wrote my review of The Old Man and the Sea. Should the bulk of my story be a clear Freytag’s pyramid of past events, like Hemingway’s tale? Should I avoid backstory, as instructed by Ben Percy in Thrill Me? Or is it ok to spend entire sections in flashback and backstory? The success of Ishiguro’s novel suggests that my story’s structure can work! How hopeful.

Just the other day, I saw a preview for a new movie adaptation of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Penned recently in 2021, the story’s premise seems relevant to the technological conundrum of our present day. Now that I’ve had a taste of Ishiguro’s gorgeous literary style, perhaps I’ll read a few others of his, including Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go.