The Remains of the Day

“Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.”

Stevens is a man stuck in a bygone age. He dwells on his memories because he feels ill-fitted for modern life. He is desperate for some form of human connection, though he will never admit to this. Instead, he tries to foster empathy with others by insisting that “many of us” (8) share his reluctance to let go of the past. As evidenced in the novel, however, few people cling to the past in the same fundamentalist way that Stevens does.

“I must say, I was rather disappointed, for I would like to have discussed the bantering question with him.”

The so-called banter that Farraday introduces to Darlington Hall is a key issue for Stevens. To the aging butler, the notion that he should joke with his employer is remarkably and horrifically modern. His attempts to understand “the bantering question” (16) are symbolic attempts to understand the modern age, which seems as strange and incomprehensible as Farraday’s jokes.

“And even when I had assured myself I was on the right road, I felt compelled to stop the car a moment to take stock, as it were.”

Stevens’s car journey is a metaphorical attempt to move forward with his life. He leaves behind Darlington Hall as he ventures into the unknown. As with everything in Stevens’s life, however, he struggles to let go of the past. He proceeds with utter caution in a stuttering manner, too scared to go too far from what he knows and understands. He insists that this slow progress is due to care when really it is due to a fear of the unknown future.

“Yet it is my firm conviction that at the peak of his career at Loughborough House, my father was indeed the embodiment of ‘dignity.’”

Stevens struggles to express himself emotionally, but the terms in which he frames his father’s career indicate his respect for William. Stevens spends large parts of the novel reflecting on the importance of dignity as a core value and the ultimate expression of his career as a butler. To say that his father embodied this ideal is a subtle way to suggest that Stevens has spent his life trying to measure up to the towering figure of his father, at least in a professional sense.

“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing.”

The more Stevens talks about his profession, the more he seems to treat it as a religion. To be a great butler, to Stevens, is to achieve a level of devoutness and stoicism akin to a high priesthood in a religion. His fervent, unwavering commitment to these ideals—even in a changing world—shows that his views are faith-based rather than empirical. Stevens’s career has been striving toward an almost religious ideal, as though he is campaigning for sainthood in the world of the butlers.

“Such marrying amongst more senior employees can have an extremely disruptive effect on work.”

Stevens treats romance as another professional inconvenience. He does not dismiss romance as ridiculous or irrelevant. It is simply a force of nature, like sickness or the weather; love is an obstacle that can be overcome with careful planning, good instincts, and professionalism. Stevens’s struggles to declare his love for Miss Kenton emerge from his inability to disentangle the reality of love from his practical view of romance as a professional inhibitor.

“So much so that after his arrival at Darlington Hall, even the brief exchanges necessary to communicate information relating to work took place in an atmosphere of mutual embarrassment.”

The relationship between Stevens and his father is emotionally repressed. The men cannot express their emotions to one another, so they can only communicate through professional comments. Both men recognize their flaws and understand that their communication failure is a problem. They are embarrassed by this, but neither man knows how to change.

“This was just as well, for I saw only just in time a hen crossing my path in the most leisurely manner.”

Throughout the novel, Stevens struggles to understand jokes. In one of his first excursions away from Darlington Hall in many decades, he encounters a living embodiment of this problem. His journey halts when he is confused by a chicken crossing a road. Playing on the traditional jokes template of asking why a chicken crossed the road, the novel blocks Stevens’s path and progression with one of the most stereotypical examples of a joke and forces him to navigate the issues, just as he must navigate his new employer’s simple, good-natured banter. Stevens’s struggles with the chicken in front of his car symbolize his struggles with even the simplest joke.

“I’m proud of you. A good son. I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.”

William lays dying in his room as service continues downstairs. Recognizing that the end is near, William can pierce the veil of formality that has descended over his relationship with his son. Only the bleak reality of impending death is a strong enough force to provoke him to be emotionally honest with his son. William dies in the knowledge that he told his son that he was proud of Stevens’s accomplishments. Not yet confronted by his own mortality, Stevens does not yet have the tools to respond in kind.

“Any butler with ambition simply did his best to climb as high up this ladder as possible, and by and large, the higher he went, the greater was his professional prestige.”

Stevens’s views of social progression contain subtle psychological boundaries and restrictions which he cannot understand. He views great butlers as towering figures who have reached the top of their profession. However, he cannot understand that they have remained fundamentally butlers and servants. None of these men can break free of the power, wealth, and status restrictions they place on themselves. Stevens believes that there is a nobility in service, so much so that he cannot ever imagine himself as not being subservient to someone else.

“It’s very beautiful. But it is probably a kind of mock period piece done only a few years ago.”

The American guests arrive at Darlington Hall with a degree of cynicism. They are ready to denounce everything as fake, believing that the architecture or the furniture is somehow a “mock” (91) version of its true counterpart. Stevens is accused of being a “mock period piece” (91). The accusation shows Stevens’s incompatibility with modern life. He is relentlessly authentic and sincere in his beliefs and lacks any pretense. But he is such a relic of the past that—to modern people—he can easily be dismissed as a pantomime echo of the real thing.

“Indeed, you will appreciate that to have served his lordship at Darlington Hall during those years was to come as close to the hub of this world’s wheel as one such as I could ever have dreamt.”

Stevens is so invested in his role as the butler that he can never imagine himself in a position of actual power. His greatest ambition is to serve a powerful, influential person rather than be that person himself. In this instance, he can only envision himself as being proximal to the wheel rather than one of the influential people himself. His ambitions are inherently limited by the worldview he imposes on himself.

“I have been studying this program because the witticisms performed on it are always in the best of taste and, to my mind, of a tone not at all out of keeping with the sort of bantering Mr. Farraday might expect on my part.”

The world of banter and jokes is so alien to Stevens that he has to study such topics as though they are a foreign culture. His efforts to joke with people are simple and rarely effective, but the lengths he goes to try and equip himself with humor illustrate his dedication to the job. He listens to the radio shows and tries to imitate their jokes like someone practicing a foreign language to communicate with a new person.

“I had been rather pleased with my witticism when it had first come into my head, and I must confess I was slightly disappointed it had not been better received than it was.”

Stevens tries to make a joke with the local people, but it falls completely flat. He cannot understand why, as the structure of the joke seems sound to him. He reviews his failure as though he were taking an itinerary of an evening’s service at Darlington Hall, wondering which parts worked and which needed improvement. Stevens’s efforts to improve his joke-telling mirror his efforts to build relationships. He tries and fails, but his main struggle is understanding his failure when he is convinced that he has done everything correctly.

“No other objects in the house were likely to come under such intimate scrutiny from outsiders as was silver during a meal, and as such, it served as a public index of a house’s standards.”

Stevens’s attitude toward the silverware indicates his attitude toward himself and the rest of the staff. The butler and the staff are, to him, an object of the house. Their skill and dignity reflect well (or poorly) on the household, so he and his staff must be as polished as the silver at all times. Stevens’s unrelenting attitude toward standards results from his view that he and the staff are more extensions of the household than people.

“However, the possibility had already occurred to me that Mr. Farraday was simply feigning indifference in order to minimize my embarrassment, and such a surreptitious delivery could be interpreted as complacency on my part towards my error—or worse, an attempt to cover it up.”

Stevens has spent so long operating along such a rigid and unique set of rules that contact with anyone who does not know or follow those rules causes him distress. Years under Lord Darlington have shaped Stevens to the point where the differences between Darlington and Mr. Farraday distress Stevens. He overanalyzes every detail, terrified that he has allowed his standards of dignity to slip in some unknown manner. An incident Farraday hardly notices becomes a source of immense anxiety for Stevens as he wrestles with his place in a new world.

“I should perhaps say a few words here concerning these meetings in her parlor at the end of each day.”

Stevens worries that other people might think him capable of human emotion. His narrative implies that he is deeply in love with Miss Kenton, but he never explicitly states this. When Mr. Farraday jokes about this issue, Stevens assures his employer that his interest is strictly professional. Even the audience must be constantly reassured that Stevens only holds a professional interest in Miss Kenton, even as the audience has access to Stevens’s innermost thoughts.

“In any case, while it is all very well to talk of ‘turning points,’ one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect.”

Stevens correctly identifies that there are pivotal moments in his life that dictate his future, but he insists that people are only capable of recognizing such moments with the benefit of hindsight. In the novel, Miss Kenton and Reginald Cardinal explicitly tell Stevens that he is on the cusp of one of these “turning points” (130), but he is so committed to the immediate moment that he cannot see the bigger picture. Stevens misinterprets his own failures as a failing of humanity as a whole.

“It is quite illogical that I should feel any regret or shame on my own account.”

Stevens mounts a rigorous defense of his life undermined by his own story. Though he may insist that it would be illogical for him to feel regret or shame about his actions, the existence of the novel and his constant reflection on turning points in his life suggests that something irks him about his past. While he may protest that he is happy, his actions and narrative suggest otherwise.

“The likes of the people here, they’re bound to take you for at least a lord or a duke.”

Stevens is mistaken for an aristocrat when he visits a local village. The experience shows how an expensive suit and a certain accent contribute to the social construct that is class. Stevens is from the upper classes because he looks and sounds the part to these people. They are willing to believe, even though they have no idea about Stevens’s material wealth. Stevens believes there is something fundamental about class, and certain people are just born into an immutable social class and cannot be changed. He does not consider himself among the upper classes, but to these people, he is. Stevens is forced to reckon with the reality that the entire structure of society is not as natural and as certain as he has held it to be when someone like him can be readily accepted as a duke or a lord.

“It’s his instinct. Because he’s a gentleman, a true old English gentleman.”

Reginald Cardinal damns his godfather with faint praise. To Cardinal, Lord Darlington is a naïve old man whom the Nazis have manipulated. To Stevens, Darlington is a sincere man who pursues a just cause. Both can be true, but Cardinal’s explanation is more pertinent. Both men regard Darlington as a “true old English gentleman” (163), but Cardinal’s analysis of the situation shows how this identity can be perilous in modern times. Lord Darlington, his naivety, and the class system he represents are simply not fit for purpose in the modern world.

“I can see few other explanations for that sense of triumph I came to be uplifted by that night.”

Stevens feels a sense of triumph because he feels he has reached his professional peak. Miss Kenton and Reginald Cardinal have presented two forms of temptation to him: she has tempted him with romance, and Cardinal has tempted him to betray his employer. On both occasions, Stevens remained steadfast. He adhered to his strict idea of dignity. He is proud of himself for doing so, and his actions are perfectly concurrent with his ideology and beliefs. However, he will come to regret his decision. Lord Darlington’s downfall and the question of unresolved love for Miss Kenton will haunt Stevens for years to come. His professional peak will eventually come to haunt him as a missed opportunity.

“I believe I thought of it as simply another ruse, Mr. Stevens, to annoy you.”

Stevens is not alone in his struggles to communicate. Miss Kenton admits to him that her inability to explain her feelings to Stevens caused her to act in unexpected ways. She accepted a marriage proposal as a “ruse” (173), something with which she could try and force Stevens into admitting that he cared for her. She tried to provoke a man who prided himself on being incapable of being provoked. Miss Kenton’s life since has been shaped by that ruse; her fate has been dictated by his failure to properly communicate.