Memory as a Powerful Medium to Determine Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day

Abstract

Since memory has often been considered a site of nostalgia and resistance, The Remains of the Day (1989) by an acclaimed Japanese-British writer named Kazuo Ishiguro appears to be telling the tale of how memories of past determine a person’s identity. The novel is set in England and the narrator is the quint-essential English Butler, Mr. Stevens who has given more than thirty years of his life to serve his English master, Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall. It is July 1956 and his present American master, Mr. Farraday wants him to go on a motoring trip for few days. Consequently, the butler decides to take a leisurely drive through the English countryside and it is during his trip, he realizes the futility of his life spent at Darlington Hall. Stevens, who had confined himself to the four walls and had always been pompous of his professional achievements, now realizes that he has achieved nothing in his life. It is pertinent to mention that though Stevens’s master sends him on a trip to relieve him from his duty for a few days but he (the butler) fails to disassociate himself from the past and it is his journey into the past that uncovers various doubts about how his own life has been and how he has failed in building good human relationships. The present paper, therefore, is a deliberate attempt to bring to the forth the memory as a powerful medium to determine one’s identity.