Reading Order
The Remains of the Day Reading Order
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) is a complete standalone novel. Ishiguro has written other novels (Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun), but they are entirely independent. The Remains of the Day follows Stevens, an elderly English butler who takes a rare motor trip across the country in the 1950s — and reflects, as he drives, on his decades of service to a lord whose politics he now cannot fully acknowledge. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was adapted into a film in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
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The Remains of the Day
Complete The Remains of the Day Book List
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro·1989·Standalone — an English butler on a rare motor trip in the 1950s reflects on his service and the professional loyalty that allowed him to avoid confronting what his employer was doing; Booker Prize winner 1989
The Remains of the Day — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Remains of the Day a standalone?
Yes — The Remains of the Day is entirely self-contained. Kazuo Ishiguro has written six other novels (A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, Klara and the Sun), but they are entirely independent.
Who is Lord Darlington in The Remains of the Day?
Lord Darlington is the employer Stevens has served for decades — an English aristocrat who believed he was acting honorably by facilitating negotiations between the British establishment and Nazi Germany in the 1930s. By the 1950s, Darlington is dead and his reputation is ruined. Stevens cannot fully acknowledge that the man he devoted his life to was morally wrong, because to do so would be to acknowledge that his own devotion was wasted.
What is the romance in The Remains of the Day?
Stevens had a professional relationship with Miss Kenton, the head housekeeper at Darlington Hall, that was clearly something more than professional — and that he consistently refused to allow to become anything more. The novel implies that Stevens loved Miss Kenton but chose professional dignity over human connection, and that she married another man as a consequence. His visit to her in the present day — the ostensible purpose of his trip — is the emotional climax of the novel.
What is The Remains of the Day about?
The novel is about the cost of repression — Stevens has suppressed his emotional life so thoroughly in service of professional dignity that he has missed everything that might have made his life meaningful. Ishiguro uses the unreliable narrator to show Stevens's self-deception: the reader can see what Stevens cannot quite let himself see. It is also about complicity — Stevens's professional loyalty allowed him to ignore what his employer was doing politically.
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