Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is, on the surface, a beautifully restrained novel about a butler looking back on his life. Its prose is measured, elegant, and deceptively calm—much like Stevens himself, the narrator whose voice guides us through decades of service at Darlington Hall. On my first reading a decade ago, I was delighted with the irony of Stevens’s life: his unwavering devotion to a flawed master, his refusal to acknowledge love when it stood before him, his self-delusion disguised as dignity. The book struck me as quietly comic and deeply human. Ishiguro’s sentences glided, and Stevens’s missteps felt both tragic and oddly endearing.
When I returned to the book recently, however, I found it much darker. In the intervening years I have visited ten Nazi death camps in Poland, Germany, France, and Czechia. That experience pressed new weight onto Ishiguro’s novel, which is, among other things, a story about collaboration, denial, and the moral cost of misplaced loyalty. What once seemed like a sad but somewhat abstract tale of professional blindness now read as a chilling study in the ordinary mechanisms of evil.
Lord Darlington’s Shadow
On the earlier reading, Lord Darlington registered to me mainly as an aristocrat duped by history, a man too naïve to see through German diplomacy in the 1930s. His Nazi sympathies were embarrassing, even foolish, but I read them with a degree of detachment. This time, they chilled me. Darlington did not simply invite Herr von Ribbentrop for tea; he opened his estate to treasonous meetings where appeasement and collaboration were dressed in the garb of “gentlemanly understanding.” Knowing, now, what Auschwitz looks like, or Majdanek, or Ravensbrück, I could not skim past these episodes. They stood out like black stains across the otherwise polished wood of Ishiguro’s setting.
Ishiguro is too subtle to sermonize. Instead, he lets the horror seep through by contrast. The novel’s silences—its evasions, its unspoken acknowledgments—become thunderous. Darlington’s name, disgraced after the war, is defended by Stevens with painful loyalty, and each defense now reads like complicity. “Lord Darlington was a gentleman of great moral stature,” Stevens insists, and one feels the lie tightening like a noose.
The Choices Stevens Made
This darker emphasis recast Stevens for me as well. Before, I pitied him primarily for his personal failures: his inability to accept Miss Kenton’s affection, his cold dismissal of his father’s dying hours, his blindness to the possibility of a life beyond service. Those ironies still sting, but now they seem less like the gentle sadness of a missed romance and more like evidence of a man who gave away his humanity to serve a cause unworthy of him. Stevens’s professional pride, his endless rationalizations about “dignity,” become mechanisms of denial.
One moment that haunts me is Stevens’s absence at his father’s deathbed. He tells himself that duty requires him to attend to Lord Darlington’s important guests. Those guests, we later understand, include Nazi envoys. His choice is not only between filial love and professional duty; it is between human compassion and participation, however indirect, in the machinery of evil. On my first reading, I saw this as tragic misjudgment. Now it looks like moral blindness of the gravest kind.
The Machinery of Rationalization
Stevens’s narration, with its pauses and hedged justifications, is itself a case study in self-deception. Ishiguro crafts a voice that reveals by what it hides. Stevens insists, for instance, that “it is not my place” to question Lord Darlington’s political views, and in that deferential phrase lies the whole tragedy: the abdication of moral responsibility under cover of professionalism. He repeatedly reframes his life’s choices as minor sacrifices for the sake of dignity, yet the cumulative effect is devastating. The more he rationalizes, the more hollow his life becomes.
This rationalization felt poignant before; now it feels terrifyingly familiar. The history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s is full of men and women who “just did their jobs,” who persuaded themselves that loyalty excused silence. Stevens, in his small way, becomes their mirror.
Beauty and Darkness
And yet, the book remains beautiful. Ishiguro’s prose is spare, controlled, almost like chamber music. The road trip frame, with Stevens driving through the English countryside, provides moments of pastoral calm that contrast with the storms beneath the surface. The understated style amplifies the darkness because it refuses melodrama. By the time Stevens realizes—too late—that he has given his life to a cause both ignoble and loveless, the quietness of the revelation is more devastating than any outburst could be.
The irony that first delighted me is still there, but now it feels less like a gentle smile and more like a knife’s edge. Stevens is both comic and tragic, both absurd and horrifying. Ishiguro allows us to see how an ordinary man, clinging to ideals of service and dignity, can waste his life in the service of betrayal.
Reading The Remains of the Day twice, ten years apart, shows how literature deepens with us. The book I first encountered was about lost love and misguided loyalty. The book I read now, after walking through Auschwitz and Dachau, is about moral blindness, the banality of evil, and the human cost of devotion to the wrong master. Both readings are true; the difference is in the shadow that history casts.
Ishiguro’s genius lies in writing a novel supple enough to contain both. Stevens remains one of the great unreliable narrators of modern fiction, and The Remains of the Day remains, for me, a masterpiece that only grows darker—and more necessary—with time.
Also, The Movie
A postscript: I have not and will not see the movie version of The Remains of the Day. My habit is not to see movie versions of novels I love. But in this case, I heard Ishiguro speak at the Philadelphia Free Library in 2015. He was talking about his just-released book (my second favorite of his novels) The Buried Giant. As soon as the host asked for questions, everyone wanted to talk about The Remains of the Day.
One of the first questions was about the movie. In answering the questions, Ishiguro talked about being a young novelist and all the excitement of having his novel made into a movie. He said, "I would not have chosen Anthony Hopkins as Stevens."
The man who could play a convincing Hannibal Lecter, Odin, Nixon and C.S. Lewis could not also be the sort of shallow martinet that is Stevens.
