Remains of the Day. Stevens as Narrator

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What kind of narrator is Stevens? Use textual examples from The Remains of the Day to support your response. This essay will argue that Stevens epitomises what it is to be an unreliable narrator. The transparency of his first person testimony to an assumed reader and the very restriction of his limited perspective will be discussed as being crucial to the understanding of Stevens as this unreliable narrator. The evasive, deceptive and revisionist characteristics of his narrative will in turn be considered, as factors that motivate yet control Stevens as a narrator throughout the book. As with Ishiguro’s first two novels[1], The Remains of the Day is told from a first-person narrative perspective, that of Stevens, the ageing butler. Traditionally, first-person narration creates a confidence between the narrator and their audience but this is never established between Stevens and his ‘real’ reader for within the first few pages of the novel it becomes clear that Stevens is addressing an ‘imagined’ reader. Phrases such as “As you might expect” (Ishiguro 1990:4), “Now, naturally, like many of us,” (1990:7), “but you will no doubt appreciate” (1990:14) and “But you will no doubt also understand what I mean when I say…” (1990:29) lead us, the real reader, to the understanding that Stevens has assumed certain prejudices about his narratee. His narratee almost becomes a projection of himself and his own values and the real reader very quickly sees through the fact that Stevens cannot see outside his own prejudices and social sphere. Stevens devotes many pages of his narrative (1990:31-35; 113-116) expounding the criteria of The Hayes Society and its regulation of standards among butlers, for this is the standard by which he himself adheres to and by which, he assumes, his readers will discern. As his prejudices are well to the forefront of the novel, the sceptical
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