Reading Order
The Remains of the Day Reading Order
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) is the Booker Prize-winning novel of an English butler named Stevens who, in taking a road trip through the English countryside, begins to reckon with the choices he made in service to an aristocrat who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer — and with the love he suppressed for a housekeeper named Miss Kenton. Told entirely in Stevens's formal, self-deceiving first-person voice, the novel is a masterpiece of unreliable narration: the reader sees, in the gap between what Stevens says and what the novel makes clear, the extent of his self-betrayal and loss. The Remains of the Day is among the most widely admired British novels of the twentieth century and was adapted as a film by James Ivory in 1993.
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The Remains of the Day
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro·1989
The Remains of the Day — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Remains of the Day about?
The Remains of the Day follows Stevens, an aging English butler, on a road trip through the English countryside to visit Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper at Darlington Hall. Through Stevens's formal, careful narration, the novel reveals the choices he made in dedicating his life to Lord Darlington — who turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer — and the love for Miss Kenton that he suppressed in the name of professionalism and duty. It is a novel about regret, self-deception, and the life that passes while we are devoted to the wrong things.
What other books has Kazuo Ishiguro written?
Ishiguro has written eight novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000), Never Let Me Go (2005), The Buried Giant (2015), and Klara and the Sun (2021). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. Never Let Me Go — a dystopian novel about cloned children raised as organ donors — and The Remains of the Day are his most widely read works.
What is the meaning of the title The Remains of the Day?
The title refers to the end of Stevens's road trip — the evening on a pier when he watches the sun setting and contemplates what is left of his life — but more broadly to the question of what remains when a life devoted to service is finally examined. The phrase captures both the literal remains of the day (the afternoon and evening of life's end) and the emotional residue of choices made: what dignity, meaning, and human connection remain after decades of self-suppression in the name of professional duty.
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