Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day(1989)

response to Stevens - "you never think to look at it for what it is !" (223,my
emphasis) - further emphasizes the butler's willed political blindness.29
Yet the clearest and most compelling example of Stevens's political
repression is his total identification not with his lower-class natural father, who
suffers both a literal fall (on Darlington's property) and a figurative one (in
vocational status), but with his upper-class "cultural" father and master, Lord
Darlington. It is clear that Stevens prefers his "gentlemen" to his lower-class
father, the latter of whom is depicted at one point "pushing a trolley loaded with
cleansing utensils,mops, [and] brushes" that "resembled a street hawker's barrow"
(78). Although Stevens emulates his natural father's "expression balanced perfectly
between dignity and readiness to oblige" (38), his renewed contact with him at
Darlington Hall, which begins in1922, the year of Miss Kenton's arrival,
nevertheless precipitates awkwardness and "an atmosphere of mutual
embarassment"(64).
That Stevens "substitutes" his adopted father for his actual one is made
clear the night of his actual father's death, which coincides with the climax of
his master's international conference. At first responding to his dying father's
final words to him, "I hope I've been a good father to you, ""by nervously laughing
and repeatedly saying, "I'm so glad you're feeling better now" (97), Stevens then
quickly returns downstairs to his conference duties for his master. When his father
dies later that evening, Stevens still claims not to have time for him, remarking
to Kenton, who offers to close the dead butler's eyes, "Please don't think me
unduly improper in not ascending the stairs to see my father in his deceased
condition just at the moment. You see, I know my father would have wished me to
carry just now." He then adds, "To do otherwise, I feel, would be to let him down
"(196). But by this point the reader is unsure whether the "him" Stevens wishes not
to disappoint is his birth or his class father.
David Gurewich is thus correct but does not go far enough when he notes that
"it is only through his master that Stevens manages to establish his own worth."30
Indeed, Stevens's willingness to be a pawn of a pawn of Hilter betokens not any
fascistic political leaning on his part but rather an "emotional fascism": an
extreme, even perverse identification with his father- substitude. Appropriately,
Stevens inherits many of Lord Darlington's "splendid suits" over the years(10),
just as he dons his master's political beliefs.Moreover, Stevens "becomes" an
aristocrat merely by following orders. As he explains to Miss Kenton,

[M]y vocation will not be fulfilled untill I have done all I can to see his
lordship through the great tasks he has set himself. The Day his lordship's work is
complete, the day he is able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that

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