Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, his third novel, received the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989. The novel represents a departure for Ishiguro, whose previous novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), are set in his native Japan. The Remains of the Day is Ishiguro’s first novel set in his adopted country of England (to which his family moved when Ishiguro was five years old).

The narrative of The Remains of the Day is complex, leading to several questions. One question is, Does the story take place over six days in July, 1956, as Stevens drives through the south of England, or does the novel cover nearly forty years? The events of the past are all filtered through the memory of Stevens, and his memory sometimes proves faulty. Additionally, the novel crosses genres, displaying elements of tragedy, social realism, historical realism, social criticism, and fiction of manners. The filter of Stevens’s memory makes the novel more a form of psychological realism than of any other category. The narrative takes the form of a diary, with Stevens recording his thoughts either at the close of each day or at breaks in his travels. This allows the reader to see changes in Stevens’s thoughts on certain issues, and to see changes in his memories. The “diary” has an implicit reader, whom Stevens is addressing. He makes it clear several times that his reader is a servant, much like himself.

The novel’s title, too, invites analysis. In the final chapter, a stranger tells Stevens that the evening is the best part of the day. Stevens, applying this thought to his own life, ponders what he should do with the remains of his own day. His question may be seen as alternatively hopeful and self-defeating, as he holds out hope for his future while also explicitly avoiding a thoughtful valuation of his past. This conundrum may be applied to British society as well. What should English identity become in an era in which the British Empire’s global influence has declined or in which concepts of class are breaking down? The word “remains” can also be interpreted as referring to a corpse. With this double meaning comes the question, Who or what has died?

One episode in the novel serves as a sort of metaphor for much of the rest of the story—that is, when Stevens and Miss Kenton see Steven’s father, William, carefully examining the grounds in front of the summerhouse as though he were searching for “some precious jewel” that he had dropped. Stevens’s narrative itself, covering his memories of more than thirty years, could be considered a similar search, with Miss Kenton as the “jewel” that Stevens has allowed to slip through his fingers. Readers may even see the episode as a metaphor for the decline of the British Empire or the breakdown of the British class system.

Stevens’s character provides the reader with a sort of cultural mirror for examining Great Britain during a period of drastic social change, when British ideas of class and national identity were undergoing significant shifts. In several interviews, Ishiguro has said that a butler like Stevens could be seen as representative of the general public, blindly serving unworthy masters.

The Remains of the Day, also, features themes that continue through all of Ishiguro’s work: memory and suppressed memory. The reader must search for the ways in which Stevens practices careful self-deception. Only at the conclusion of the novel can Stevens no longer avoid the painful issues that his decisions (or lack thereof) have created in his life. Even so, in finally (if perhaps only temporarily) facing his failures, Stevens achieves a sort of painful dignity.