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

outnumbering representatives of the fairer sex" (98), and to the "rather feminine
room crammed full with so many stern, dark-jacketed gentlemen, sometimes sitting
three or four abreast upon a sofa" (92). 39
Stevens also uses language and memory itself to clothe a painful reality -
and wasted life - from scrunity. Like Joseph Conrad, who associates "words" with
"mist" and comments, "like mist, [words] serev only to obscure , to make vague the
real shape of one's feelings,"40 Ishiguro states of the language of his novel ,
"I'm interested in the way words hide meaning... The language I use tends to be
sort that actually suppresses maening and tries to hide away meaning."41 Else
Ishiguro puts this even more baldly : The Remains of the Day "is written in the
language of self-deception."42
Readers have noted that Stevens is a "great manipulator of language,"43 that
he uses "his words and his narrative to convey information to us of which he is
unaware."44 Most significantly , Stevens can talk about himself only when he talks
about others; when he talks about himself directly, he is compelled to lie. As with
the route of his meandering car-trip, his story itself might seem "unnecessarily
circuitous" (67), but that is precisely the point: his narrative intentionally
impedes his voyage of self-discovery. For example, when Stevens concludes that Lord
Darlington's "life and work have turned out today to look, at best, a sad
waste"(201), or that Kenton's life come to be "dominated by a sense of waste" (48),
he in fact describes his own "life and work"; when he addresses Kenton's "guilt" at
helping to precipitate his father's decline in professional status at Darlington
Hall (66-7), he addresses his own; when he speaks of Kenton's "nostalgia" for the
Darlington Hall of the old days(49,180), he accurately reveals his own nostalgia ;
when he refers to Kenton's "sadness" and "weariness" (233), he instead registers
his own ("you do not seem to have been happy over the years," he tells her [238]).
When Stevens remarks that Kenton undoubtedly "is pondering with regret decisions
made in the far-off past that have now left her, deep in middle age, so alone and
desolate, " and that "the thought of returning to Darlington Hall" must therefore
be "a great comfort to her" (48), it is clear of whom he really speaks. 45
Stevens also uses what he calls the "hindsight colouring" his "memory" (87)
as a means of clothing his disengagement. He often uses the present to escape a
failed past; at others times he uses the past to escape a failed present. 46
In either case, Steven's ability always to be somewhere that he is not allows him
to live what might be called a vicarious existence during the 1920s, 1930s and
1940s. It is only in 1956, after all, that he ventures forth from Darlington Hall
to see England "at first hand" (28) rather than through "Mrs. Jane Symons's The
Wonder of England" (11); it is only then that he actively seeks the company of a
woman rather than reading "sentimental" love stories from Darlington's romance
collection "about ladies and gentlemen who fall in love

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