The Butler Kazuo Ishiguro Summary

Kazuo Ishiguro is a post-colonial Anglo-Japanese writer best known for bringing new viewpoints, as well as a new consciousness, to the English literature. One of his most famous contemporary novels is set in the inner-war period and tells the story of Stevens, an English butler who embarks on a “mental and emotional journey” (Rema, Ed, & Phil, 2015) while taking a road trip to the West Country of England. The book is built upon Steven’s memories of his past days being in service of an English gentleman in the splendid Darlington Hall. This stream-of-conscious narration makes the reader get into the butler’s repressed inner self and sympathise with his final moral breakdown. As I will discuss, all over the novel Stevens meditates on the question

He first tries to clarify the matter by focusing on the greatness of the English landscape. In the evening of his first day of road trip, the butler suggests that “it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle […] the calmness of that beauty [and] its sense of restrain” (29) that makes the land of Britain Great. I suggest it is reasonable that Stevens thinks the splendour of the English landscape lies in its restraint nature since he is, actually, extremely self-restrained. In other words, what lies underneath Steven’s considerations to the question of greatness is, in fact, his own ideas of how English butlers, the ones capable of “emotional restraint” (44), should behave to achieve greatness and dignity. Certainly, Stevens has been educated in this whole matter since, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “it was his father, also a butler, who epitomised this idea of greatness” (Rushdie, 2012). Thus, the protagonist conveys his idea of dignity by explaining his father’s favourite story (about a butler who attained dignity in keeping a professional attitude in front of a difficult situation) and some other anecdotes of Stevens Sr. which illustrate “his displaying in abundance that very quality he so admired in the butler of his story” (38). In Stevens view, it is precisely keeping “the professional being [a butler] inhabits” (43) at all times that all the question of dignity is about, namely “the subjugation of the self to the job, and of his destiny to his master’s” (Rushdie,