The Remains of the Day and its challenges to theories of unreliable narration

Abstract

In an interview with Gregory Mason, Kazuo Ishiguro explained his interest in his first-person narrators: like memory, how one uses memory for one's own purposes, one's own ends, those things interest me ... deeply. And so, for the time being, I'm going to stick with the first person, and develop the whole business about following somebody's thoughts around, as they try to trip up or to hide from themselves (Mason 347). The Remains of the Day, published after the interview, continues this interest in the unreliable first-person narrator. Ishiguro's most recent novel is as much about unreliability as it is about the conflict between the public and private personae, between professional and human duty, between the facade of dignity and the expression of emotion. Indeed, Stevens's narrative unreliability is a key means through which these conflicts, largely unresolved for him, are demonstrated. In turn, the novel challenges our usual definition of an unreliable narrator as one whose norms and values differ from those of the implied author, and questions the concept of an ironic distance between the mistaken, benighted, biased, or dishonest narrator and the implied author, who, in most models, is seen to communicate with the reader entirely behind the narrator's back. While definitions of unreliability have focused on the distance between the norms and values of the author and those articulated by the narrator's words or behavior, early work on unreliable narration left it unclear how those distances were apprehended by the reader.' Chatman, for instance, suggests a kind of intuitive process of reading between the lines which is based on his perception that the narrator's unreliability is largely a matter of misreporting events:

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