The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions

Abstract

The personal concerns of Stevens, narrator and protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of Day, are inextricably bound to political and social climate that surrounds him.The personal values to which Stevens subscribes-the benevolent paternalism of his employer Lord Darlington and rigid hierarchies that structure their relationshipare values shared by a colonialist ideology.' The narrative techniques of Remains, including its famously unreliable narrator2 (Stevens's personal account of world events differs greatly from grand narratives of twentieth century), also invite a postcolonial reading. As James Lang observes, Ishiguro foregrounds an interest in the ordinary, private, and marginal lives and moments which fill long spaces between historic battles, treaties, summits, and incidents of public (151). Stevens's narrative connects personal to political in just this way, offering an alternative to a public historical record that too often elides voices of those subordinated by colonialism, by gender, or, in Stevens's case, by an unyielding class system. Despite attempts of critics to link personal to political, in an interview given soon after novel's publication, Ishiguro insists that his primary interest lies in personal concerns rather than in larger canvas of twentieth-century history: