Implications of Narrative Unreliability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyse the predominating narrative unreliability in Kazuo Ishiguro‟s The Remains of the Day (1989) within the framework of rhetorical narratology with a specific focus upon the notion of subjectivity. The homodiegetic narrator, the ageing butler Stevens, is far from fitting unproblematically into the definition of unreliable narrator. The exploration of the employment of narrative unreliability in the novel must, therefore, be aligned with central themes like the national identity and Englishness precisely because it is through Stevens‟s narration that these grand narratives can be revealed as fiction. What is at issue in the novel is also the very act of narration itself, which is problematized as evasive, nonauthoritative, repressed, and obfuscating. Stevens‟s narration is profoundly retrospective, looking backwards not only to retrieve the past memories of „great‟ days in the service of Lord Darlington, but also to base his own subjectivity upon this „greatness‟. In this respect, by dealing with various functions of the use of an unreliable narrator in The Remains of the Day, it is possible to come up with certain implications of Stevens‟s unreliability that is rendered manifest by means of evasion or repression of narration, fallibility of memory, and disintegration of subjectivity and national identity.