Kauzo Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day

UNIVERSITY OF PRISHTINA “HASAN PRISHTINA” FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The unreliable narrative of Mr. Stevens in Kauzo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Seminar Paper

Mentor: Prof. Dr. Lindita Tahiri Student: Albulena Ajeti

January, 2018

Introduction

Remains of the day written by the Japanese writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, tells the story of Stevens, an English butler who worked for Lord Darlington. The story revolves around a trip that Stevens takes, after being provided with some days off from his employer. During his trip he visits different places and encounters people who cause him to reflect and dwell on his past at Darlington

In an interview he gave for Gregory Mason, Ishiguro explains the reasons why he prefers using first person narrators. In this interview, he stated that somebody’s thoughts, how they try to hide from themselves certain aspects of their past and decide to reveal some others, interests him deeply and that he will stick with the first person and elaborate this concept further. (Mason, Gregory, 1989).
In Remains of the Day, Ishiguro presents a narrator who recollects his past memories in an attempt to heal wounds and create a sense of identity for him. Ishiguro explains:
“I need to keep reminding people that the flashbacks aren‟t just a clinical, technical means of conveying things that happened in the past. This is somebody turning over certain memories, in the light of his current emotional condition.”
Ishiguro notes how one is able to distort past events and conceal failures of the past. This, phenomenon is explained by Freud when he points out in his theory that when recollecting past experiences one does not present a picture of reality, rather, they are distortions that one makes in order to avoid what actually happened in the past. Freud’s central idea argues how conscious recollections of the past are influenced and altered by a person’s wishes and desires (Schacter, 1996). As Wong points out in, Stevens, lacking individual success and glory, hopes in finding the ‘precious jewels he had dropped