The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Over many years of holding many a book in my hands, I find myself in a phase where, the stories that most appeal to me are the deeply human ones. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a deeply human story of an ageing English butler, whom driven perhaps by the example set by his father, who was also a butler, has exercised self-restraint in a most brutal sense, in his attempt to be a ‘great butler’, and this we learn, at the cost of losing that most human attribute of all, love.
The word ‘dignity’ takes on quite a mysterious if not almost a dehumanising meaning in the way Mr. Stevens the butler, tries to define it. Dignity is the one word that, upon much deep contemplation of what makes a great butler, Mr. Stevens has arrived at. Dignity seems to signify inhabiting a professional character, and for a butler this means being wholly servile to your masters, so completely that it effectually obliterates the individual human. Reading Mr. Stevens musings of this kind of ‘dignity’ and what makes ‘a great butler’, the proverbial English stiff-upper-lip gains a clearer meaning. I could not help but draw a correlation between the complete class conditioning exercised by the English on their own people, the kind of conditioning that has turned Mr. Stevens to his own worst enemy complicit in his own servility, with the conditioning that was subjected upon the colonies of the British Empire. No wonder they were so successful at it, having practised it on their own to perfection.
Mr. Stevens out of devotion to his (former) master, in whose moral authority he believed in with a childlike acceptance, totally and completely suppresses any human emotion that may bring him out of the character of a dignified butler. He refuses to acknowledge his feelings for the spirited housekeeper, and cannot stay with his father in his dying moment nor openly mourn him, because his butler ‘mask’ may slip away and reveal him a failure.
This is a truly human story, a sad love story if you like and, in a way, a story of how we view our failings as humans, if we indeed manage to come to that point at all.
Watch a review of the book on the Reads and Reflections channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7fUkOUShyBboI8QQdEyp_w