Critical Overview
The Remains of the Day is a critical and commercial success. Reviewers’ glowing notices of the novel praise its characterization, language, tone, and thematic content. Lawrence Graver of the New York Times Book Review calls the novel “a dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class, and culture.” In a review for London’s Observer, noted author Salman Rushdie praises the novel for its ability to simultaneously present surface understatement and tremendous underlying tension. In the Christian Science Monitor, critic Merle Rubin declares, “Delicate, devastating, thoroughly ironic, yet never harsh, this is a novel whose technical achievements are matched by its insightfulness.” David Gurewich of New Criterion deems the novel a “remarkable” book in which “the pitch is perfect.” Commenting on the comic tradition of butlers in English literature, Hermione Lee of New Republic observes, “Butlers in British fiction are a joke. . . Ishiguro’s cunning is to invoke these associations— Stevens, after all, is a comic figure, pompous, funny, antiquated, and obtuse—and turn them to serious ends.” Ihab Hassan in World and I adds that Ishiguro transcends the tradition, or “more precisely, he perfects and subverts it at the same time. He does so with immaculate craft. . . . ”
Not only do critics find Stevens tragic and sympathetic, but they also praise Ishiguro’s ability to create a consistent and believable voice for a character so unlike himself. Galen Strawson of the Times Literary Supplement writes that the book is both strong and delicate, adding that Stevens’s voice “creates a context which allows Kazuo Ishiguro to put a massive charge of pathos into a single unremarkable phrase.” Echoing this idea, Graver remarks that Ishiguro’s “command of Stevens’ corseted idiom is masterly,” adding that the author’s “tonal control of Stevens’ repressive yet continually reverberating first-person voice is dazzling. So is his ability to present the butler from every point on the compass: with affectionate humor, tart irony, criticism, compassion, and full understanding.” In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani also praises Ishiguro’s controlled tone and his portrayal of unfolding realization in Stevens’s mind. He writes:
By subtly modulating the flow of Stevens’ memories and the nuances of his tone, by revealing to us the increasingly difficult emotional acrobatics that Stevens is forced to perform in order to remain in control, Mr. Ishiguro is able to create a portrait of the man that is uncompromisingly tough, and at the same time elegiac. He shows us the consequences of both emotional repression and misplaced loyalty, the costs of blindly holding onto values formed by another age. The result is an intricate and dazzling novel.
Joseph Coates of the Chicago Tribune applauds Ishiguro’s use of an unreliable narrator to reveal so much about the character. Gurewich writes that Stevens is “a fully realized character, through whom the author manages the world of his novel as sure-handedly as Stevens himself manages the beloved estate of Darlington Hall.” He adds, “There is an almost-perfect harmony of style and substance in the book’s relationship between the writer and the narrator. . . . ” Rubin is struck by the complexity of Stevens’s narrative; he remarks: “Stevens (by his own unwitting admission) has tailored his life to produce a complete façade. What makes his narrative so poignant as well as funny, its pathos and satire evenly matched, is the sincerity with which the façade has been cultivated.” Hassan interprets Stevens as an allegorical representation of modern history, suggesting that Ishiguro intends to symbolize modern politics, class, and suffering in the...
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character of an English butler.
Much is made of Ishiguro’s Japanese roots, as many critics believe that this heritage deeply influences The Remains of the Day. They note that the themes of service, discipline, and duty are Japanese in nature and that the controlled, detached tone is typical of Japanese culture. Hassan, for example, asks, “Is the result a Japanese vision of England or, more slyly, an English version of Japan? Or is it both and neither, a vision simply of our condition, our world?” Gurewich comments on this at length, observing:
[W]hen Stevens admires the English landscape for “the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart,” I cannot help thinking how neatly his description fits some of the Japanese criteria for beauty. Stevens’ attention to detail is comparable to an origami maker. . . Stevens’ insistence on ritual; his stoicism in performing his duties, especially in the face of adversity; his loyalty to his master that conflicts with his humanity—all of these are prominent aspects of the Japanese collective psyche.
Similarly, Gabriele Annan of the New York Review of Books finds that Ishiguro’s first three novels “are explanations, even indictments, of Japanese- ness,” including The Remains of the Day, which features no Japanese characters. She explains that Ishiguro “writes about guilt and shame incurred in the service of duty, loyalty, and tradition. Characters who place too high—too Japanese— a price on these values are punished for it.”
Although the majority of the reviews are positive, a handful of critics find fault in the book. Geoff Dyer of New Statesman, for example, suggests that the notion of narrative irony (in which the reader understands something the speaker says that the speaker does not) is trite. He believes that Stevens’s voice is “coaxed” to achieve this irony and thus lacks integrity. Annan is impressed with Ishiguro’s creation of the character of Stevens, but finds the novel’s message anti-Japanese and unsatisfying. She explains that the novel “is too much a roman à these [a novel written to illustrate a social doctrine], and a judgmental one besides. Compared to his astounding narrative sophistication, Ishiguro’s message seems quite banal. Be less Japanese, less bent on dignity, less false to yourself and others, less restrained and controlled.”
