SBORNÍK PRACÍ FILOZOFICKÉ FAKULTY BRNĚNSKÉ UNIVERZITY

STUDIA MINORA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS BRUNENSIS

S 12, 2006 — BRNO STUDIES IN ENGLISH 32

Zuzana Fonioková

The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity:

Unreliable Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day

As many other contemporary British writers, Kazuo Ishiguro makes use of the
literary device of the first-person unreliable narrator in his novels. Applying this
method results in what David Lodge (1992: 155) refers to as “a gap between ap-
pearance and reality,” between what the narrator tells and what actually happens.
As the narrator’s utterance constitutes the only source of the reader’s knowledge
about the fictional world, unreliable narration highlights the epistemological un-
certainty and the impossibility of finding out a single, unchallenged truth.
In this kind of narrative, the narrator’s version of the story gets into conflict
with another version, which is not narrated directly (often the narrator does not
even know about this alternative version) but the reader discovers it with the help
of “implizite Zusatzinformationen” [implicit additional information], uncon-
sciously provided by the narrator himself/herself (Nünning 1998: 6; my transla-
tion). In other words, the narrator’s version becomes suspicious because of “the
narrator’s unintentional self-incrimination,” which, according to Bruno Zerweck
(2001: 156), constitutes a necessary part of unreliable narration. Without these
hints on the part of the narrator, the reader would not be able to recognize an un-
reliable narrator. The tension between the narrator’s conscious version, the story
they want to tell, and the one s/he conveys without intending or even realizing it
gives the device of the unreliable narrator its meaning and value because it allows
the reader to discover the plot in an interesting way. The reader, however, does
not always find out what ‘really’ happens in the fictive world; in many cases, no
single correct version exists.1 In addition, the use of an unreliable narrator draws
attention to the character’s psychology (cf. Wall 1994: 21).
Unreliable narrators are mostly autodiegetic, which holds true for butler Stevens
in The Remains of the Day as well. Stevens also constitutes a good example of
a narrator who engages in long monologues about himself, becomes as if obsessed
by himself and his story and whose narration amounts to a highly ego-centric ac-
count of events. Ansgar Nünning (1998: 6) considers such preoccupation with
the topic of oneself one of the possible symptoms of the narrator‘s unreliability2.
88 Zuzana Fonioková

This self-centred kind of narrator actually provides a picture of himself, and as

the (unreliable) narrator of another of Ishiguro’s novels, the painter Ono in An
Artist of the Floating World, admits, it proves difficult to remain objective when
one’s own features are concerned: “I cannot recall any colleague who could paint
a self-portrait with absolute honesty; however accurately one may fill in the surface
details of one’s mirror reflection, the personality represented rarely comes near the
truth as others would see it” (67). The reason for the inaccuracy of self-portraits is
the personal involvement in such a report: one wants to hide the disgraceful facts
and emphasize the positive traits. However, the biased depiction of oneself and
of one’s story often happens without the awareness of the concerned person, in
this case the narrator. The narrator of Ishiguro’s first novel (A Pale View of Hills),
Etsuko, makes a comment about the limits of human capacity to reproduce events:
“Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing” (156). Stevens in The Remains of
the Day warns about the deceptiveness of memory too: “It is possible this is a case
of hindsight colouring my memory” (87). These and many other similar metanar-
rative remarks illustrate the psychologically interesting fact that Ishiguro’s – and
other – unreliable narrators do not intend to lie; they deceive themselves as well as
the reader. In Amit Marcus’s (2005: 188) words, these narrators are “self-deceiv-
ers,” who “are unaware of the strategies they employ to convince themselves of
the veracity of the lie, and therefore their state of mind is not a consequence of an
intentional act of deception, as opposed to the state of mind of the other-deceiv-
ers”. The self-deceiving narrators’ memory becomes unreliable because it sorts out
memories and erases those that do not fit into the desirable picture of themselves.
Repressing certain memories helps the narrators evade such parts of the story that
would give rise to unpleasant feelings, such as regret, shame and guilt. In this
way, the unreliable memory deforms the narrators’ sense of reality and it is this
twisted version which they present in the narration. Most of us have experienced
the same play of one’s memory: we tell a story, convinced that it is true, and then
become unsure of its veracity when confronted with a different version of it or
when we realize that it contradicts our other memories. The majority of people
have therefore been ‘unreliable narrators’ in their lives. The quality of unreliability
thus makes the narrator a realistic image of a human being.
This article deals with Stevens as an unreliable narrator in Ishiguro’s The Re-
mains of the Day and with the way he shows his unreliability by various contra-
dictions in the text and with the motives for this narrative strategy. The novel pro-
vides a great number of signals of the narrator’s unreliability both in content and
in form. I will concentrate on those inconsistencies of content related to Stevens’s
views about his profession, by which he tries to mask certain feelings concerning
his past life. They often appear in the text as a “conflict between the scenes he
narrates and the interpretations that he gives to those scenes” (Wall 1994: 25).3
The article starts with a reflection about the meaning of the book’s title in con-
nection with unreliability and then focuses on three thematic areas, in which Ste-
vens’s account proves problematic: his notion of dignity, his relationship to his
father and his attitude to Miss Kenton. I consider the first topic the most impor-
 The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity 89

tant of the three in terms of Stevens’s unreliable narration; it influences the other
two spheres as well. The analysis demonstrates that the significance of narratorial
unreliability transcends the field of a descriptive narrative theory: the reader’s
detection of the narrator’s unreliability influences his/her notion of the narrator as
a character, of the other characters and of the events in the fictional world.

Remains of the Day

The novel’s title probably symbolizes the ‘evening of life,’ the phase Stevens has
entered and in which he looks back at his past life. However, one can attach these
words another meaning. Renata Salecl (1994: 15) points out an interesting “anal-
ogy between remains of the day and the Freudian ‘day’s residues’”. According to
Freud (1952: 237–38), the unconscious processes of “dream-work” combine ex-
perience from the individual’s waking life – the “residues of the day,” that is the
memories of the previous day – and the unconscious impulses to form the “mani-
fest” version of the dream. In the dream, in which the unconscious content of our
minds becomes accessible, the memories of the day and the dreamer’s wishes and
thoughts therefore appear distorted, disguised as something else. Salecl’s inter-
pretation of the title thus implies the narrator’s unreliability: if Stevens’s recol-
lections of the past correspond to the ‘day’s residues’ (where we consider ‘day’
his life), then the reader has to expect to see them transformed by the narrator’s
unconscious into the distorted ‘manifest’ version – the story he presents to us. In
addition, Freud (1986: 399–400) says that dreams underlie an additional “second-
ary revision” when the dreamer in his/her presentation of the dream strives to pro-
vide it with an acceptable meaning and so alters the dream by the interpretation
s/he puts on it. These modifications to the dream resemble Stevens’s adjustments
to the story and his additional explanations of various situations in an attempt to
present a coherent story, whose individual parts do not contradict each other. For
example, Stevens presents his life as dedicated purely to his profession, therefore
he has to correct his comment “I was not actually engaged in professional mat-
ters” regarding his reading a romance (165). Viewing the event in retrospect, he
assigns a professional motive to this activity – he claims to work on improving
his “command of the English language,” which he holds for a duty (167).
Stevens’s real journey has a metaphorical parallel in the trip his mind makes
to the past. His recollections aim to refigure his life as well: the butler attempts
to create a new account of his past life, one more acceptable to himself than
his real life-story. He tries to narrate his life in a way that conceals the “terrible
mistake[s]” of his life and that imparts his existence a greater importance (239).
In order to achieve this goal, he omits some details of what happened and what he
did in his life and stresses some other events. Ishiguro comments on this feature
of his narrator: “[Stevens] ends up saying the sorts of things he does because
somewhere deep down he knows which things he has to avoid... Why he says
certain things, why he brings up certain topics at certain moments, is not random.
90 Zuzana Fonioková

It’s controlled by the things he doesn’t say. That’s what motivates the narrative”
(qtd. in Shaffer 1999: 8). In other words, it is not primarily the pronounced that
makes up the story of Stevens’s life, but the withheld, the facts that the reader
finds as if between the lines. The apparent – told – version appears as a result of
what the narrator hides. In this way, for example, Stevens emphasises his former
employer Darlington’s qualities of a gentleman and the butler’s own role in vari-
ous dealings, but refuses to deal with Lord Darlington’s proved – although pos-
sibly well-meant – support of the Nazi regime. I will now try to demonstrate what
leads Stevens to this selective and therefore unreliable account of the past.

Dignity

Stevens often re-interprets some events in order to display the way he acted as in-
evitable and as the only appropriate possibility he could have chosen. This feature
of the narrative suggests that Stevens attempts to justify his acts and behaviour.
The profession of butler serves him as the directive determining his action, by
which he explains much of his behaviour. He presents a kind of “butler-science”
that includes many rules, which must be followed by everyone who wants to
become a perfect butler.
He regards having “dignity in keeping with his position” as the most important
condition for becoming what Stevens calls “a great butler” (33). Stevens explains
that this dignity “has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the pro-
fessional being he inhabits” (42). In other words, butlers must stay butlers all the
time, under all circumstances, which demands considerable “emotional restraint”
(43). They must suppress their personality and they must never reveal their feel-
ings. The profession of a butler then includes repression of all wishes, emotions
and opinions that – according to Stevens – do not fit in with the profession. He
calls such repression of oneself ‘dignity’. He takes great pride in possessing such
‘dignity,’ which, however, on many occasions contrasts with the usual use of the
word. His interpretation of this term fails to match dignified behaviour as such.
Gradually it becomes obvious that his ideal of butler equates blind loyalty to the
employer.
Stevens’s recollections of the incident of discharging two Jewish servants dem-
onstrate this fact especially clearly. He remembers that he disagreed with the dis-
missal of the Jews but suppressed his opinion. More importantly, he considers not
revealing his doubts an act of dignity. When Miss Kenton, by contrast, shows her
shock, he scolds her for expressing her opinion and tells her to “conduct [herself]
in a manner befitting [her] position” (149). He agrees to something wrong but with
‘dignity,’ in his understanding of the word, whereas Miss Kenton refuses injustice,
thus abandoning her professional self, which is always loyal to the master and the
rules of the household, for her own personality. Form proves more important to
Stevens than content, and dignity can be displayed for its own sake. In this case,
his pursuit of ‘dignity’ serves him as an aid for repressing his self – his opinions
 The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity 91

and feelings – and for evading responsibility. He believes that servants are not fit
to make “judgements of such a high and mighty nature” and diminishes the mean-
ing of protests against Anti-Semitism by labelling them “foibles and sentiments”
that should be suppressed in compliance with the employer’s wish (149). Stevens
shows his lack of his own identity in the response he gives to Miss Kenton’s ques-
tion about his contentment: “The day his lordship’s work is complete, the day he
is able to rest on his laurels, content in the knowledge that he has done all anyone
could ever reasonably ask of him, only on that day, Miss Kenton, will I be able
to call myself, as you put it, a well-contented man” (173). He has transferred the
responsibility for his own life onto Lord Darlington. Serving his employer stands
for the meaning of his life; he does not need to look for it on his own. His blind
dedication to Lord Darlington makes something similar to a slave out of him, and,
as a villager’s common sense says, “there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave”
(186). Stevens refuses this opinion in that he reveals his negative attitude to de-
mocracy, which serves him as an excuse for disposing of responsibility:

There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary people can learn and
know, and to demand that each and every one of them contribute ‘strong
opinions’ to the great debates of the nation cannot, surely, be wise. It is,
in any case, absurd that anyone should define a person’s ‘dignity’ in these
terms. (194)

He tries to justify his attitude to life as he sees it threatened by a different view,

one that shows his life-long dealings as mistaken and, above all, empty of dig-
nity.
However, it is rather Stevens’s own definition of ‘dignity’ that the reader will
find absurd.4 This clash of notions becomes most evident at the point when Dar-
lington and his guests use Stevens to prove the correctness of their view of de-
mocracy as of an inadequate system: the butler lets them ridicule him and claims
this situation to be a demonstration of dignity on his part. By showing the butler’s
lack of knowledge, the gentlemen want to demonstrate that opinions of people
like him should not have any weight in the society. Stevens has no other self than
that of a servant, whose importance lies merely in serving the employer; he is not
expected to make his own decisions and have his own opinions. It is this kind of
people, who repress their identity and who can be made unquestioningly loyal,
whom totalitarian regimes need to pursue their goals. Furthermore, butlers who
happily sacrifice their own life to serving their employer contribute to maintain-
ing the social hierarchy: it is a matter of ‘dignity’ for them to blindly fulfil the
wishes of a person who stands higher in the hierarchy.
By this unrestricted loyalty Stevens contributed to Lord Darlington’s collabo-
ration with the Nazi regime. As he devoted all his life just to serving Darling-
ton, the knowledge of the consequences of the master’s activities discloses the
uselessness of the butler’s life. It is this strong sense of waste that Stevens tries
to conceal from himself and which motivates his twisted view of dignity. He
92 Zuzana Fonioková

wants to convince himself that living up to the criterion of ‘dignity’ gives his
past life a meaning. However, he exhibits inconsistency in presenting the criteria
for a ‘great butler.’ First Stevens disagrees with the criterion of being “attached
to a distinguished household” (113), later he introduces the “moral status of an
employer” as vital to professional prestige (114). Apart from possessing dignity,
great butlers must also be employed by great gentlemen, through whom they
“make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world” (116) and
achieve “serving humanity” (117). Stevens probably adds this condition to the
definition of the perfect servant because he feels the need to assign the profession
of butler an importance that would help him justify his life devoted wholly to the
duties of this job. Such revisions of the narrated often signal unreliability of the
narration because they imply either the narrator’s uncertainty about the story or,
as in this example, his attempt to produce a story without contradictions.
In order to make himself believe that he spent his life attached to a “distinguished
household” (113), “Stevens struggles to reconcile his own private memories of
Lord Darlington [...] with the public vilification of Lord Darlington after the
war” (Lang 2000: 145). He forces himself to erase the knowledge of his master’s
wrong deeds from his mind and wants “to avoid any possibility of hearing any
further such nonsense concerning his lordship,” which would bring to his con-
sciousness just the repressed information (126). If Stevens accepted that serving
Lord Darlington amounted to the opposite of “serving humanity” (117), he would
have to admit that all his life was wasted on serving the wrong man. Therefore he
presents his employer as a gentleman, which enables him to maintain the feeling
of importance that he had as a butler in a good house. But this version, showing
Lord Darlington as contributing to the goals of humanity, does not correspond
with the narrator’s description of events in which Lord Darlington participated,
such as the dismissal of Jews. Furthermore, he delights at the thought that an im-
portant meeting between Lord Halifax and Herr Ribbentrop turned out a success
with his contribution and that he therefore had some importance in “the course
of history,” although he knows that he contributed to evil (139). What is more,
his blind devotion – demonstrated, among others, in the incident with the Jewish
servants – makes it impossible for him to question the “moral status of an em-
ployer” (114). Therefore, he is unable to judge if he meets one of the prerequisites
for becoming a great butler – that of having a noble employer. This inconsistency
in his theory of great butlers contributes to the reader’s perception of Stevens’s
unreliability as a narrator.
The reader can observe another instance of a clash between Stevens’s com-
ments on the one hand and depictions of events on the other hand in the butler’s
preoccupation with choosing the right clothes to represent his house, opposed
to the butler’s reports of his actual action. Although he claims to be prepared to
represent his house with dignity because “one never knows when one might be
obliged to give out that one is from Darlington Hall, and it is important that one
be attired at such times in a manner worthy of one’s position” (11), he describes
three occasions on which he denies having worked for Lord Darlington three
 The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity 93

times: when a chauffeur whom he meets asks him directly, when Mr. Faraday’s
guest inquires and when he pretends to be a gentleman among villagers. Such
discrepancies strongly contribute to the reader’s suspicion about the narrator’s
reliability. As Mike Petry (1999: 6) puts it, “Ishiguro […] often reveals his narra-
tors’ attempt to hide, by having them stumble over their own contradictions and
inconsistencies”. Stevens ‘stumbles’ over the incongruities in his narrative be-
cause he tries to tell the truth but his view is distorted by his unreliable memory,
which has eradicated the memories that do not fit into the picture he wants to have
of himself and of his life. These discrepancies lead to a kind of dramatic irony,
that is to “a contrast between the narrator’s view of the fictional world and the
contrary state of affairs which the reader can grasp” (Nünning 1999: 58–59). In
other words, through the incongruities in his tale, Stevens himself provides the
reader with signals about the existence of a different version of the story and thus
about his narratorial unreliability.
One part of his life that Stevens feels the need to explain and justify is made up
by his personal relationships to two people: his father and Miss Kenton. Here again
the inappropriateness of Stevens’s interpretation of the word ‘dignity’ surfaces.

Father

The main condition for ‘dignity’ – the complete suppression of emotions – ap-
pears bizarre and unnatural when Stevens points out as an example to follow his
father who, while serving a man guilty for the death of his elder son, managed
not to show anything of the pain and anger that dwelt inside him. Since Stevens
admires his father as someone who “not only manifests, but comes close to the
personification itself” of dignity, this example exposes the butler’s conception of
dignity as at least highly unnatural, if not completely inhumane (42). This sup-
pression of human emotions on both sides shows itself in Stevens’s relationship
with his father. They do not speak with each other about other than professional
matters, and even the little communication they have takes place “in an atmos-
phere of mutual embarrassment” (64). They have repressed their emotions with
the aim of becoming ‘great’ butlers. Their striving for dignity, paradoxically,
leads to embarrassment: they have lost their ability to pursue human conversa-
tion. Consequently, the son just conveys the message about the restriction of his
father’s duties and is not able to discuss the problem. Although he admires his
father as a former butler, he does not manage to tell him anything less cruel than
that he does not cope any more: “The fact is, Father has become increasingly
infirm. So much so that even the duties of an under-butler are now beyond his
capabilities” (65). That Stevens mostly addresses his father in the third person,
too, symbolizes the coldness and impersonality of their relationship.
The narrator admits that he “may have given the impression earlier that [he]
treated [his father] rather bluntly over his declining abilities” but he quickly finds
an excuse: “there was little choice but to approach the matter as I did” (69–70).
94 Zuzana Fonioková

Typically, the excuse bears the form of a professional matter again – the outcome
of a coming conference would have been jeopardized if he had allowed “indul-
gence or ‘beating about the bush’” (70). Once again, Stevens tries to justify his
action by presenting it as the only possible way of dealing with the situation and
uses his devotion to profession, therefore to the ideal of a ‘great butler’ having
‘dignity,’ as the authority dictating him what to do. His ‘philosophy’ of dignity
serves him as a means to rationalize his suppression of emotions.
The same excuse enables him to repress his feelings of guilt about the way he
treated his father on the deathbed. He avoids dealing with the emotionally dif-
ficult situation of his father’s dying under the pretext of urgent professional du-
ties and thus escapes from unpleasant feelings into the safety of his job: “This is
most distressing. Nevertheless, I must now return downstairs” (104). He refuses
to interrupt working in order to go to see his father after he has passed away,
claiming that his father “would have wished me to carry on just now” (106).
Here the gap between the butler’s father as a model – the ‘personification’ of
‘dignity’ – and his father as a person becomes visible.5 While the father as an
example of a ‘great butler’ demands him to ‘carry on,’ his real father would
have appreciated a personal conversation, which he attempts to start by saying,
“I hope I’ve been a good father to you” but which his son evades (97). It appears
absurd that while he does not manage to exchange a few sentences with his dy-
ing father, Stevens converses and even laughs with his employer’s guests in
such a sad situation. In addition, it seems suspicious that the narrator goes into
great detail in depicting some of the scenes (such as his conversation with young
Mr Cardinal), but omits any of his feelings about the father. The reader learns
about Stevens’s grief or sadness not directly from the narrator but through other
characters, such as Lord Darlington, who tells Stevens: “‘You look as though
you were crying’” (105). This is another occasion on which the narrator chooses
to dwell on one topic in order to hide something else and on which “what is not
told turns out to be as, if not more, significant as what is told” (Petry 1999: 10).
This kind of evading the theme that the reader perceives as vital corresponds to
what Tamar Yacobi (1987: 34) calls the “exegetical deflection”. This situation
involves “the speaker’s misfocusing” rather than “any direct misjudgment on his
part: the issue most central or relevant […] is passed over in silence throughout
the mediator’s discourse, while side-issues receive liberal commentary” (Yaco-
bi 1987: 34). Once again, Stevens conceals his suppressed emotions behind the
mask of a ‘great butler’. This gap in the story allows him to view his action as
dignified and thus remember the night his father died “with a large sense of tri-
umph,” because he managed to suppress his feelings and dedicated himself fully
to the duties of his profession even in a complicated situation (110). Seeing the
night in the light of his success as a butler, as the rules of ‘dignity’ enable him,
helps Stevens avoid his sense of guilt or mistake regarding his treatment of the
ageing father. Again, the narration proves unreliable because Stevens fails to ad-
mit certain feelings.
 The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity 95

Miss Kenton

Even more obviously, Stevens tries to hide from himself the mistake he has made
in his relationship to the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. In order to do so, he evades
acknowledging any feelings towards her other than professional. However, his
typical inconsistencies of the unreliable narrator betray his real state of mind. The
discordance concerns, among others, Stevens’s interpretation of Miss Kenton’s
letter.
After receiving the letter, Stevens decides to accept Mr. Faraday’s offer to go
for a trip, because the letter provides him with what he believes to be a profes-
sional reason for the journey. He claims to have discovered “distinct hints of her
desire to return” to the house and assumes that the return of the former house-
keeper to the house would solve his recent problems – that is the errors which
have been occurring in his work for some time now (9). The letter leads him to
realize that the errors result from the low number of staff in the house. The fact
that he found the reason for problems in the house only after being “prompted
accidentally by some external event” creates a suspicion that he is just making
up excuses for his mistakes (9). Furthermore, this excuse enables him to go to
see Miss Kenton: he sees that the trip “could be put to good professional use”
(10). However, Stevens does not seem completely certain about this reason for
his trip. His remark “and why should I hide it?” when admitting that it was Miss
Kenton’s letter that made him decide to make the journey shows that he is not
quite willing to unveil the reason – maybe it is not entirely professional after all.
Also, after taking into account various aspects of the planned trip, he says: “But
all in all, I can see no genuine reason why I should not undertake this trip” (20).
This conclusion suggests that he feels the need to justify the journey – convince
himself that he is not doing anything which does not fit in with the demands of
‘dignity’ – as romantic emotions towards a woman certainly do not.
However, the case of Stevens’s attitude to Miss Kenton differs from that of
his relationship to his father. He denies having made a mistake in a large part of
his narrative, but towards the end he starts to suggest his discontent with the out-
come of his acquaintance with the housekeeper, as when he sums up the possible
“turning points” in their relationship (175). The ‘turning points’ refer to events
in which the butler somehow refuses Miss Kenton’s indirect offers of a more
personal relationship, as when he cancels their cocoa meetings, or when he shows
an inappropriate reaction, as when he scolds her instead of expressing his condo-
lences. Through these incidents Stevens prevented his “professional relationship”
with the housekeeper from deviating from the “proper basis” and therefore ruled
out the possibility of romance between them (169). Stevens admits that by his
behaviour during these events he ruined “whole dreams forever irredeemable,”
but he does not explain what he means by these dreams (179). If he conceded that
they stand for the fulfilment of love between him and Miss Kenton, then he would
have to admit his feelings towards her and therefore accept the huge mistake of
his life. To do so would cause him pain and so he represses this knowledge and
96 Zuzana Fonioková

briskly explains his “becoming unduly introspective, and in a rather morose sort of
way” by “the late hour” (179). Similarly, he acknowledges the subjectivity of his
reading of the letter – “I might have well read more into certain of her lines than
perhaps was wise” – but he does not examine the reasons for his misinterpretation
(180). Only after his meeting with the former housekeeper does he recognize his
feelings towards the woman and when she tells him that “there’s no turning back
the clock,” he admits that “at that moment, my heart was breaking” (239). Then it
becomes clear that what he believed to be Miss Kenton’s “unmistakable nostalgia
for Darlington Hall” expressed in the letter (9), which he interprets as her regret
for having left the house and as a “desire to return,” in fact belongs to him (48).
He himself desires the housekeeper’s return because he sees in it another chance
to “sort out the vagaries of one’s relationship with Miss Kenton” and fulfilling
of the aforementioned ‘dreams’ (179). The supposition of this hope on Stevens’s
part is further supported by the narrator’s ignorance of the woman’s real name,
gained from the marriage (Mrs Benn): he still calls her by her maiden name and
“her letter has given me extra cause to continue thinking of her as ‘Miss Kenton,’
since it would seem, sadly, that her marriage is finally to come to an end” (48).
Using her maiden name helps him retain his faith that there might still be a way to
compensate for the mistake he made years ago. Yet Mrs. Benn’s remark “there’s
no turning back the clock” (239) robs him of his “vain hope of undoing the past”
and makes him accept his true feelings (Lodge 1992: 156).

In an attempt at self-justification, butler Stevens unconsciously distorts the

narrative of his life. His theory of great butlers, involving his subjective percep-
tion of the notion ‘dignity,’ should help him excuse his life-long passivity, his life
spent as a servant. It should also cover the mistakes he made in the relationships
with his father and with the housekeeper, the only woman he could ever love.
However, Stevens indirectly reveals the falsity of this mask and the reader dis-
covers a different version of the story. The reader’s recognition of narrative unre-
liability therefore throws a different light on the plot. Furthermore, the narrator’s
unreliability draws attention to the personality of Stevens as a character and to his
inner fight, making the novel interesting in terms of human psychology.

Notes
1 This is the case in The Remains of the Day, too: Stevens’s revisions, corrections and re-
orderings of some events, such as Miss Kenton’s crying (first explained by her aunt’s death,
later by her engagement), connected with his psychological projection of his own feelings
into other figures and his own doubts about his statements, leaves the reader unsure of the
final version of the story: Is it really Miss Kenton who cries? Stevens admits that “there was
no real evidence to account for this conviction” (226).
2 These symptoms on their own, however, just raise the reader’s suspicion about the narrator‘s
unreliability; they must appear in combination with other signals to become a clearer indication
of this phenomenon. The final decision about the narrator’s trustworthiness depends on the
reader and the way s/he chooses to interpret the text (Nünning 1998: 29).
 The Butler’s Suspicious Dignity 97

3 Wall (1994: 25) correctly notices that this kind of unreliability “depends largely upon the
unreliable narrator’s reliable report of the story” that fails to harmonize with his commentary
upon the story. She argues that Stevens’s scenic presentations are “reliable because they are
so frequently naively critical of his own behaviour” (Wall 1994: 26).
4 To be more precise, I should write ‘an average contemporary reader from the West’. The
theorists advocating the cognitive approach to the unreliable narrator (notably Ansgar
Nünning and Bruno Zerweck) claim that – apart from textual signals of narrative unreliability
– extra-textual realities play an important role in assessing the possible unreliability of the
text. As it is the reader who decides if the narrator is reliable or not, one of these contextual
factors is the reader’s society, its “moralische und ethische Maßstäbe, die in ihrer Gesamtheit
das in einer Gesellschaft vorherrschende Werte- und Normensystem konstituieren” [moral
and ethical standards, which as a whole constitute the system of norms and values prevailing
in a society] (Nünning 1998: 30; my translation). Therefore I admit the possibility that
a reader of a cultural background different from mine might find Stevens’s notion of dignity
in accordance with their understanding of the word, as well as that there exist individuals
sharing the same culture with different notions of the term. The reading might also change
with time, because, as Zerweck (2001: 158–59) argues, “[t]he interpretation of narrative
unreliability largely depends on a complex of contextual historical factors such as values,
norms, real-world models, literary competence and conventions, or even on the cultural
understandings of what comprises literature.”
5 Cf. Molly Westerman (2004: 162), who also points out the difference between Stevens’s father
as an exemplary great butler and as a real person, and stresses the imaginary – constructed
– nature of the father as an ideal butler: “Despite his warm relationship with the construct of
his father as paradigmatic butler, Stevens’s relationship with his father, the actual person, is
unhappy and contradictory.”

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Mgr. Zuzana Fonioková

Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University
Arna Nováka 1
602 00 Brno
zuzuzuzu@email.cz