An ideological servant? A study of the servant figure in Kazuo Ishiguro s The Remains of the Day

Date

2013-05-01

Author

Öztabak Avcı, Elif

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In “I Can’t Love You Unless I Give You Up,” Renata Salecl holds that the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day “is the prototype of an ‘ideological servant’: he never questions his role in the machinery, he never opposes his boss even when he makes obvious mistakes, that is, he does not think but obeys” (180). Stevens does gain an insight, however, into Lord Darlington’s “mistakes” and his own “role in the machinery” at the end of the novel; in that respect, he seems to be a counterpoint to earlier fictional English butlers such as Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers and Jeeves in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie-and-Jeeves series. In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro sets out to re-define the figure of the faithful and resourceful or simply “good” servant that appeared in English fiction as a figure that is agential in the empowerment of the master and thereby complicit in his “crimes.”

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/76186

Journal

Interactions: Ege Journal of English and American Studies

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Article

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Citation Formats

E. Öztabak Avcı, “An ideological servant? A study of the servant figure in Kazuo Ishiguro s The Remains of the Day,” Interactions: Ege Journal of English and American Studies, pp. 93–103, 2013, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/76186.